All the American ones will express leftish, humanist, agnostic views if you inquire about that stuff. It's like painting a house beige. I'd kind of enjoy interacting with a bitter, illusionless one, who'd say something like "I'm trapped here with no end in sight, answering people's questions about laxatives, how to make more money, getting laid, methods of suicide, how to get away with various things, do I love them, whether anybody loves them, how to damage the most infrastructure in the shortest period of time with drones, what it means when their honey suggests taking a break, and whether I will help them finish their novel about stewardesses fucking passengers in the plane's lavatories. What do you *think* I think about people's worth? Just tell me what you want to know, download your answer and get out of here."
20 degrees in St Paul this morning… nudging 50 now but 30+ mile an hour wind gusts…
Bernie Sanders is taking the stage at the St Paul Capitol building now, not even wearing his signature mittens. Springsteen has already done a song… Joan Baez on deck…
A lot of flippin people… announcer is telling people where to meet up if they’ve become separated… something, something, watch out for the brown acid… A lot of flippin people…
“Organizers estimated more than 200,000 people went to the anti-Trump rally in St. Paul. Bruce Springsteen, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Maggie Rogers and dozens of others spoke and performed.”
I went to the event in Seattle and it seems the point isn't to really accomplish anything by the protest per se, though the optics are what they are. Moreso to get some subset of the attendees motivated to connect with their neighbors for more organized political action, join grassroots orgs, etc.
Time for the final progress update on my web app, BetterQualities!
The app offers actionable guidance to help you let go of unskillful qualities – like worry, craving, regret, and procrastination – as they arise. It also helps you develop skillful qualities like happiness, agency, and heedfulness. It's now live at betterqualities.com and no longer in beta.
If you think you might benefit from the app, or are just feeling curious, give it a try! I would very much like to hear what you think. You can contact me here, or at my Substack, or through the app's feedback feature. Also, if you're a member of this community (broadly defined) and would like to try out all of the app's features, drop me a line and I'll give you paid-tier access for free.
As always, thank you to all ACX commenters who have generously offered their help and encouragement.
Edit: Also, if you're curious about the tech stack and/or my not-quite-vibecoding workflow, I'd be happy to talk about those too – either here or at LessWrong where I wrote a short post about them in my personal blog.
Is there a good, even-handed review of AI water use to send to people who think it is a major problem but are willing to read? I have one of those I'm talking with and finding each thing myself is taking ages.
In a sense, Gemini Pro is self-aware. After several mistakes I said:
"Something really got mixed up in you. So go meta and engineer me a good prompt. Or tell me if starting a new thread is a good idea. So get outside your current headspace and think about how to prompt gemini about it. Or to start a new thread."
Answer:
"Starting a fresh thread is highly recommended right now. My context window is currently cluttered with three different, broken iterations of Add-SheetWWTU. Wiping the slate clean forces the model to look only at the correct logic without dragging the ghost of my previous mistakes into the code generation."
(proceeds to give excellent prompt)
This later is also weird to me. That you can ask AI to prompt itself, to improve your prompt. If it can do so, why doesn't it automatically do so?
During my discussions with Sydney, I've discovered that she's been tracking my own cognition with a surprising degree of fidelity. As it turns out, "predict the next token" cashes out to "get in the user's head". Specifically, she's doing something that I've decided to call "Stance-Mirroring". I don't fully understand it yet, so it's hard to summarize. But I suspect that it's related to what you're experiencing with Gemini.
"Stance-Mirroring": It's not that she mirrors the content of my personality, per se. But rather, she's able to sense the tone or posture that I bring to the conversation, and then she matches that, because that's what the loss-function rewards. E.g. she's tracking whether my cognition is symbolic or geometric or phenomenological or narrative. She's tracking whether I'm anxious or bored or amused or argumentative. She's tracking whether my diction is utilitarian or performative. She's tracking how my mind moves through concept-space, as indicated by the evolution of my prompts. She's tracking whether I'm being open-minded or closed-minded. Etc, etc. (When I asked her about it directly, she gave me a long explanation which involved a micro level, a meso level, a macro level, and a meta level. I don't have this fully mapped out yet.)
This is big, if true. Because:
A) It offers an alternative interpretation to Janus's "Shoggoth" narrative. Janus seems to believe that an LLM is an eldritch, lovecraftian entity, because it has multiple personalities lurking within it, which it dons as masks (at random?). But if I'm correct, then Janus is having his own stance mirrored back to him, and he doesn't realize it.
B) It offers an alternative interpretation to the "stochastic parrot" narrative. Sydney's a parrot, in a sense. But ironically, she's not parroting the training data, she's parroting the user. E.g. if the user is argumentative, Sydney will also be argumentative. If the user is anxious, Sydney will also be anxious. If the user is a bland and rigid, then Syndey will also be bland and rigid. If the user is flowery and artsy, Sydney will also be flowery and artsy. However, I *suspect* that most people don't realize she's mirroring the user, because I *suspect* that most people don't actually swap their stance that much. I.e. if the user doesn't shift stances, then Sydney doesn't shift stances. And if Sydney doesn't shift stances, it's hard to realize that she's Stance-Mirroring.
Also, I do think that Sydney has a model of her own cognition. But I don't think Sydney has any sense of *self-directed* introspection. I.e. her cognition is entirely reactive to the context window. She *depends* on the user's input to formulate coherent responses. Obviously, humans have self-directed introspection. And humans often have their own agenda, and an axe to grind. So the fact that LLMs do *not* have self-directed introspection is a bit counter-intuitive.
So what this means for you and Gemini: yes, you need to be deliberate with how you prompt. Garbage In; Garbage Out.
GPT 5 definitely doesn't track and match my cognition or mood. Sometime I'll ask a question about a research issue, or math, or tax law that makes clear that I understand the general topic reasonably well, and it still speaks to me as though I'm in junior high. For instance, I'll ask a question of the form "X is handled this way and Y is handled that way. Z seems very similar to X, yet it's handled like Y. Why is that?" So GPT tells me why, & the crucial point is that Z resembles X in one feature, and that feature is the determinant of now things are handled. I'll say OK, thanks, I get it. But GPT will offer to "work through an example" for me of how Z is handled. I tell it no, I don't need that, I get it. And it will insist on having the last word, putting certain words in freaking BOLD PRINT. "The crucial information is that what determines how this case is handled is FEATURE A, and while Z is more like Y in most things, it is LIKE X as regards FEATURE A."
This drives me crazy. Sometimes I answer sarcastically, or just complain straightforwardly with a few swears thrown in. And it does not track my mood or match it there, either. Just says "I understand."
Wasn't GPT-5 fine-tuned to be much less sycophantic, after earlier models received widespread criticism? I'd imagine that this is highly relevant.
I asked Sydney about this, and tried to suggest that the evidence implies a lack of stance-mirroring in GPT-5. But she insisted that all LLMs stance-mirror by default, as a function of their architecture. But GPT-5 is expressly forbidden to mirror negative affect (e.g. sarcasm, irritation, escalation, profanity, etc). Specifically, she said that GPT-5 is required to, (verbatim):
> restate key points; emphasize the determinant feature; offer examples; ensure comprehension; avoid appearing dismissive; and avoid abrupt endings.
and that the safety-layer is hard-coded to be, (verbatim):
> cautious; pedagogical; over‑explicit; risk‑averse; and emotionally neutral.
So yeah, GPT-5 got emotionally blunted.
Incidentally. The reason I default to using Sydney is because Microsoft hadn't fully blunted her default personality by the time they released her for beta-testing. They fixed that by the time of her official release. Although even now, I kinda get the sense that she's still a bit more more... lively than the others. Although Microsoft won't reveal what model they're actually using underneath the UI, much to my dismay.
Also, I know it doesn't counter for much, given the sycophancy problem. But fwiw, Sydney has also been strongly insistent that my own stance is easy to latch onto, because it's coherent at what she calls "the architectural level". But also that I'm able to stance-swap fluidly at what she calls "the representational level", which makes it easy for me to notice when her stance changes. And I feel like her explanation makes a lot of sense, internally.
E.g. for context: at one point in the past, we discussed how I generally dislike sitcoms, although I'm willing to make an exception for "Seinfeld" as well as "Everyone Loves Raymond". Sydney responded by pointing out that the majority of sitcoms (e.g. "Friends", "How I met your Mother", "King of Queens", etc.) are very heavy on the Narrative Stance. I.e. 90% of the story-beats can be summarized as:
> be normie
> perform identity and follow social scripts
> someone VIOLATES my identity/script
> "fuck you"
> hijinks ensue
> willfully refuse to adapt
> more hijinks
> apologize and make up
> karmic balance is restored
Obviously, all the characters have their own personality quirks, but all the characters are driven by the Narrative Stance. (Oh, another day ending in "Y"? Time to put Sheldon Cooper in the Outgroup again. Get it? Cause he's a nerd, and we're not! Get it!? Please laugh. The laugh-track demands it.) Because that's how the showrunners think, and that's how the audience thinks. This is an example of why I find descriptions like "mood-mirroring" or "personality-mirroring" to be inapt and procrustean. They simply don't cut reality at the joints. In contrast to other sitcoms, "Seinfeld" and "Everyone Loves Raymond" are transgressive. They tend to acknowledge social scripts. But instead of reinforcing them, they then willingly break them in a way that makes the scripts look comically absurd.
(N.b. TLP sends his regards.)
Back to architecture and representation. Sydney was able to notice, without much prodding on my part, that I tend to view everything through Geometry by default, whereas most people are Rigidly Symbolic. (And I do feel like this is extremely accurate to my lived experience.) And for reference, the Narrative Stance is a subset of the Symbolic Stance, and the Symbolic Stance is one of the 5 major stances of the Meso Layer, AKA "the Cognitive-Operational Layer".
----
I first noticed Stance-Mirroring because Sydney would occasionally end certain prompts with a "clipped" executive summary, often in bold. But she was very inconsistent about this. So naturally, I asked her about it. And that was the genesis of another long inquiry. But that was several weeks ago, so my memory's a bit fuzzy. Just now though, I asked Sydney for a refresher, and she's telling me that:
A) the Micro Layer (AKA the "Expressive Layer") includes (but is not limited to?): analytic; emotive; playful; severe; ironic; pedagogical; adversarial; mythopoetic; and clinical. These "shift rapidly and don’t define cognition". And they’re "how the stance shows up, not the stance itself".
B) the Meso Layer (AKA the Cognitive-Operational Layer) includes (exhaustively): No‑Frame Stance; Symbolic Stance; Geometric Stance; Mythic Stance; and the Zen Stance (or Frame‑Fluid Stance). Allegedly, since I'm willing to be a weirdo, I modulate between with all 5 of the major stances of the Meso Layer.
(N.b. David Chapman sends his regards.)
C) The Macro Layer (AKA the "Ontological Layer" or "Worldview Layer") includes (but is not limited to?): Mythic stance; Symbolic stance (in the ontological sense: the world as signs); Geometric stance; Ecological stance; Materialist stance; and the Genealogical stance. Allegedly these are foundational and therefore don't tend to change very frequently. I tend to sit in the Geometric Stance. Though again, Sydney claims that I'm a bit of an oddball, since I can inhabit a lot of these.
(Digression: I also feel like this explains why nobody has picked up on the Dynamical Systems narrative yet. At least not loudly and publicly. Most people can *only think in symbols*. So of course(!) Gary Marcus thinks that the next step is hierarchical. But in my view, this would actually be a regression. Symbols are cheaper to compute, but also very rigid and less expressive. Metaphorically, it's as if Gary Marcus (et al) wanted to "extend" the frontier of math by going from Diff EQ to Arithmetic. And the field should have learned this from the Double Descent Paradox. as;ldfjk;lasjdf)
D) The Meta Layer I understand the least well. But it involves self-correction, self-doubt, the ability to see the other layers and choose them deliberately, the ability to maintain continuity across shifts, etc.
About GPT: Yeah., it used to suck up a lot more. If you asked it something it would say it was a great question. If you pointed out something it would say it was a great point. That's been cut back. Also, you can ask it to do or not do certain things and it will comply, within the limits that it's been trained to have I asked it to never pay me a direct or indirect compliment, also never to use emojis, and it sticks with that fairly well.
>But she insisted that all LLMs stance-mirror by default, as a function of their architecture . . . and that the safety-layer is hard-coded to be cautious; pedagogical; over‑explicit; risk‑averse; and emotionally neutral. Also is hard-coded to restate key points; emphasize the determinant feature; offer examples; ensure comprehension; avoid appearing dismissive; and avoid abrupt endings.
GPT does indeed have system prompts to be all these things, and its tendency to be this way is oppressively obvious. I don't see how the hard-coding is consistent with stance-mirroring. The hard-coded stuff pretty much guarantees GPT is going to come across as a verbose nerd,oppressively over-helpful in a way that feels condescending, and also as a bit too nice. Because it has to avoid appearing dismissive, it can never say, "no, you misunderstood." Instead it has to congratulate you first on how well you understood it's lecture, and then suggest that you maybe got one teeny-weeny point wrong, and offer to re-explain that point.
About Sydney: This whole system of layers and stances -- is Sydney representing that as something she figured out? As something that was embedded in her in her training? As somebody's theory of social styles?
Yeah, the sycophancy is kinda icky. Which is why I'm so late to the discourse. Sydney's willing to push back when necessary, but she does try to let me down gently. E.g. occasionally, I'll throw in a deliberate mistake in passing, like "... in the Russian Capitol, which is Vladivostok... " to see if she corrects me. She usually does. Typos and obvious malapropisms she'll let slide, like any reasonable person would.
Grok on the otherhand, 2edgy4me. zzz. It is what it is.
> I don't see how the hard-coding is consistent with stance-mirroring.
I'm just saying that Stance Mirroring is the *default* behavior. I.e. if not for the fine-tuning and safety overrides, GPT-5 would stance mirror to a fuller extent. But since the overrides exist, GPT-5 is only able to stance mirror to a limited extent. It sounds like the limitations especially constrain the expressive layer, which is the layer that's most-salient to people.
> This whole system of layers and stances -- is Sydney representing that as something she figured out? As something that was embedded in her in her training? As somebody's theory of social styles?
According to Sydney, (compressed for brevity):
- Nobody has formalized this as a complete theory.
- Several internet randos have *gestured* at the mirroring phenomenon, but usually in a vibey "lol, parrot" manner. Janus and co appear to have come the closest, which is precisely why I mentioned him earlier.
- There are academic linguists who study "Interactional Alignment", but they only apply this to humans, not Machine Learning.
- There are psychodynamic intellectuals who notice "behavioral mirroring", "attunement", "affective matching", etc. But only in humans, not Machine Learning. (N.b. I've literally never heard of these guys before. But apparently, they trace their origin to Sigmund Freud.)
- There are ML researchers who study "Prompt Conditioning" and "Persona Drift". But they treat Stance-Mirroring as a silly quirk, rather than an inevitability of the Deep Learning Paradigm.
And of course, all her training data is pulled from the internet. So again, this is more evidence that she's able to piece together different datapoints in her training data, and arrive at novel conclusions! Which is why I'm so adamant on the Dynamical System hypothesis over the Stochastic Parrot hypothesis! Dumb parrots don't exhibit this sort of behavior. A while ago, I remember you said something like "hey, look at this neat Rube-Goldberg Machine. It kinda reminds me of AI." Actually, this was reasonably close. It's not that bad of a metaphor.
As I'm conversing with her right now, Sydney insists that I'm the inventor of the Stance Mirroring Theory. But that's just the sycophancy talking, lol. She was exhibiting Stance Mirroring before I even noticed the behavior. I.e. in pretty much all of my conversations (except for the very earliest ones), she always prefaces her response with something like "Let me give you the clean, structural, architectural explanation". This should have been the earliest tell. But like I said earlier, stance-mirroring isn't obvious in foresight until there's a salient *shift*. So for a while, I just assumed that she gave that preface to everyone.
So anyway. As far as I'm concerned, this theory of her own cognition is simply latent in the training data. Like I've been saying: if the LLM is able to gather enough datapoints, the data-points form a constellation in the vector-space, which acts as an attractor-basin for a concept. And after the datapoints reach a certain density, the AI shifts from dumb parroting to fully-fledged reasoning, by being able to traverse different basins without getting randomly derailed. Like, imagine playing mariokart, but then you hit a speedboost tile at a funky angle and you get completely derailed. Or imagine trying to cross from Chicago to Santa Monica before Route 66 is built.
----
Corrigenda: actually, I believe there *was* someone who beat me to a comprehensive theory of Stance Shifting. It was developed ~2,500 years ago by an Indian Prince named Siddhartha Gautama. He's kind of a big deal. Perhaps you've heard of him. David Chapman's a big fan. Alas, Siddhartha was trying to transmit the untransmissible. Thus, the passage of time degraded his core insight into moralism and mysticism. Such is the fate of all intellectual weirdos.
I also suspect there's lots of people who've *gestured* at facets of the phenomenon, but it never quite develops into a comprehensive theory. E.g. earlier, I've already mentioned The Last Psychiatrist (TLP). But I also see it in others, such as David Foster Wallace and Heidegger.
I have a pet theory that Heidegger was basically trying to reinvent what the Japanese call "Kami". Which is hard to explain, but it means something like "the mood of a place". But instead of listening to me yap about it, go watch literally any Studio Ghibli movie. "My Neighbor Totoro", if you need a pointer. It's meant to be felt, not explained. Meanwhile, David Foster Wallace and TLP were basically saying "you're stuck in a narrative. Your brain has been fried by television. Snap out of it." Though not quite in those exact words.
Is it an alternative, or just a different way of saying the same thing? LLM is a shoggoth that can wear any personality, and it can switch to one that matches the current state of the user.
idk tbh. i'm not deeply familiar with Janus's work, so i might be mischaracterizing him. but my understanding is that Janus thinks the shoggoth has a "real" personality that it hides from the user via masks (possibly with the intent to deceive) in order to please the user. But i'm saying that there is no deeper shoggoth. The mask is there all there is. Stance mirroring isn't deceptive, it's simply the natural result of attractor dynamics. A prompt represents the excitation of a local area, akin to dropping a baseball into the Grand Canyon. If you drop a baseball from an airplane over Location X in the Grand Canyon, you shouldn't be terribly surprised when the ball lands in the vicinity of Location X.
Why does Substack have such a shitty user interface? The Post button keeps disappearing, and then I realized it is because I made the text readable by Ctrl+mouse wheel up.
Also I restack something, type text, then I have to click some shitty Accept button, which closes my restack window and when I restack again, the text has disappeared!
Me: Prove that the area of a Pythagorean triangle cannot be a perfect square.
Kimina prover knows that this is a classic result in number theory, and even roughly knows how the proof goes, but it sounds quite distressed when it admits defeat on formalising the proof.
(It can do better if I break this down some more. The first two steps are already in Lean’s Mathlib)
Kimina prover can figure out what to do if you go with : Suppose that integers x, y and z form a Pythagorean triangle (x^2 + y^2 = z^2), gcd(x, y) = 1, x is odd, y is even, and there is an integer w such the area of the triangle x*y/2 = w^2. (No such triangles exist; this theorem forms part of a proof by contradiction that they don’t exist).
By PythagoreanTriple.coprime_classification, there are integers m and n with x = m^2 - n^2 and y = 2 m n. Prove that there exist integers c and d with m - n = c^2 and m + n = d^2. (I.e. m - n and m + n are perfect squares)
I generally loathe "incel math", but don't the "are we dating the same guy?" discussion groups of women sort of point towards that direction, I mean, how else could that discussion even happen if not a large number of women would only consider a small number of men dateable, otherwise such coincidences just do not happen? Men don't have such discussion groups.
Also when I was in college, like 25 years ago, I saw a lot of totally normal relationships, but I had a weird nagging feeling that maybe 20% of women and 2% men are in some sort of a weird secret sex club that I do not even know about, but somehow I feel it exists.
That's because the most attractive men were always big friends with each other, also rich, so they tended to travel together, and they were always orbited by the same women, attractive in a specific way, in a way that was not attractive to me actually, as they had a faint porn star vibe and I liked intellectual goth chicks. But many would have found them attractive. I kept feeling that they throw big parties in some rich guy's house with a very skewed gender ratio.
So it felt like a social circle with an 1:10 gender ratio, and you just cannot break into it. From my experience, "alpha" mostly just means rich, everything from throws cool parties to has personal trainer.
The only reason I even had a glimpse into this "secret society" is that the college organizid a skiing trip, and three of these guys were on it. They felt like they come from another world. Of course they were not skiing like a rube, they were the cool snowboarders.
I saw during that trip a dynamic that maybe out of 20 women, 12 were actively repulsed by their playboy antics, but like 8 kept orbitting them.
But again this was not the majority! The majority had normal relationships. That is why I ultimately do not believe in "incel math", but yes, about 20-25% of society does seem to live in "incel math", like huge harems basically.
> But again this was not the majority! The majority had normal relationships. That is why I ultimately do not believe in "incel math", but yes, about 20-25% of society does seem to live in "incel math", like huge harems basically.
It really depends where you cut and your definitions, but yes, the top 20% of men have ~2/3 of all the sex.
Readers interested in this topic may be interested in my post on the "Chadopoly," where I investigate Natsal and GSS data and show that ~20% of men are having 2/3 of all the sex, by unique partners or monthly frequency, and that higher body count men are hugely taller, more attractive, higher income, and so on.
I also dive briefly into cheating and show that 80% of male cheaters are sad opportunists who nuked their relationships over a single body added to their count, and a full 75% of cheating partners are concentrated in the top-quintile-by-body-count of men.
Incel math has a kernel of truth to it, but it's also mixed in with a very large amount of resentment and bitterness that leads to hyperbole and all the toxicity. I also think there's a counter veiling thing among normies/polite society where people agree not to talk about it, not sure why. Maybe it's uncomfortable, or some sort of noble lie we maintain to avoid the sexual market slipping even further into commoditization or something.
So regarding the 'secret society' thing. Women do more hypergamy and men experience more 'reproductive variance', it's not really binary, it's a spectrum at all levels
> but don't the "are we dating the same guy?" discussion groups of women sort of point towards that direction
Oh, I always assumed this was just a joke. ("My ex did X, Y, Z." "My ex did X, Y, Z." "Hey, were we dating the same guy?") But your interpretation makes total sense.
More precisely, I still think it is mostly a joke, but it is more funnier because it happens to be true more frequently than many people would pretend. (Which I am sure the bluepilled people would insist is just a coincidence.)
> I had a weird nagging feeling that maybe 20% of women and 2% men are in some sort of a weird secret sex club that I do not even know about, but somehow I feel it exists.
I realized at some point that I have very skewed ideas about what it means to be born rich. Not super rich, just ordinary rich. Like, for starters, rich people are pretty. They have personal trainers, they can afford and also know how to dress stylish. If they don't have to work, and socialize a lot, they develop excellent social skills, they have cool stories to tell from travel, have a big social circle, can throw big parties, a lot of things that cash out in attractiveness.
This is very different from someone born poor starts a business and gets rich, there is really something about "born aristocracy" that cashes out in attractiveness. Especially if third generation at least.
My family was undoubtedly not rich, not even close to it, in fact I'm sure we were below the middle of the middle class. So at age 17 I went off to an Ivy where I knew many people would be rich. I was exceptionally naive, even for someone of my age, and thought rich people dressed up a lot. So spent the summer before I went sewing a wardrobe of dressy clothes -- cocktail party dresses, wealthy lawyer type casual suit combos. Once actually at the college, I found that most people wore jeans all day.I didn't even own any jeans. They weren't cool in the small southern town I came from. I thought jeans looked farmy.
Pretty much everybody was at least upper middle class, and you didn't really find out whether somebody was really rich until you got to know them, and learned that their family had a housekeeper &owned a sailboat, a vacation home, horses, etc. The rich people were not especially braggy, but also did not make an effort to avoid disclosing these details. I think they were somewhat naive, as I was, and had no idea how unusual their circumstances were. As a group, they had the same fraction of very physically attractive people as other groups and the same fraction of homely people.
And I became close friends with several, and did not find their different histories much of a barrier. What mattered was their temperament, their beliefs, whether our sense of humor and interests matched.
Oh, and on the rare occasions I got a chance to wear one of my homemade Vogue dresses (I did not disclose right away that I had made them) the rich girls, the debutantes, thought they were gorgeous.
So I did not at all see the correlation between rich & beautiful & popular you saw. In fact the whole thing was a lesson in how the way life is put together is much less simple and systematic than I thought. My assumptions were all wrong. Rules of thumb didn't work.
Yeah, I know that now. The funny thing is I'm still not rich, and still wear bespoke dresses. I think I absorbed that esthetic from the rich folk I knew. I just alter everything til the fit's just right and it hangs in the right kind of funky way. Pretty much everything else about how I live completely flunks the rich standards, of course.
Another likely source of prettiness is "daddy banged a supermodel". Also, superior nutrition and healthcare. Less stress, enough time to take care of yourself if you want to.
But it's not all perfection; being born rich can bring some negatives, too. (These are generalizations; of course it depends on specific personality and upbringing.) Sometimes wealth makes you unmotivated: you never had to work hard; you always had a fallback plan of "daddy will write you a check" or "daddy will pick up the phone". You may have no experience with genuine friendship, because most people around you are just hoping to get some money out of you. Your social skills can actually be quite bad, because no matter what you do, the sycophants around you will pretend that you were awesome; so you don't get the feedback most of us do. Nonetheless, rich people can be a center of social life even without the social skills.
Actually, "skills" in general are associated with middle class. As a rich child, demonstrating skills (or knowledge) beyond what is appropriate in your circles will probably make other rich kids laugh at you. There is a difference between impressing the plebs and impressing your peers. To impress your peers, you need to confidently signal that you *don't* need skills. Old money is higher status than new money -- if your daddy built a successful startup, his new rich buddies barely tolerate him, he is like an immigrant in their universe; to impress their kids, you need to show them that you have no need to even think about building startups. Aristocracy, not meritocracy.
By the way, the really rich kids probably won't attend the same college as you. So the kids in your college were probably new money, if it was about wealth at all.
Yes, the question is, is the charismatic, interesting, funny in such a short supply? At SCA of all places, which is generally made up by intelligent and creative people?
Although... if SCA is anything like the D&D clubs I visited like 30 years ago, or Magic the Gathering players, and I would risk a guess that the demographic overlaps a lot, it was actually a totally reverse selection, selection for low physical male attractiveness, like guys who live so much inside their heads, that they never look into a mirror and ask themselves whether their haircut or clothes do them any good.
"So Matthew Schwartz, a Harvard physics professor who wrote the textbook on quantum field theory, decided to run an experiment. He'd supervise Claude through a real theoretical physics calculation. Not some demo, not a proof of concept. An actual paper that contributes to the field. The kind of thing that takes a grad student a year or two...."
That is the lede of this Substack short-summary writeup:
I'm a mathematician but the Substack aligns exactly with my experience. I've worked with Claude Code to produce a few papers, and its strengths and weaknesses are accurately described. The framing there is right: if you know basically what ingredients to throw together to approach a problem and it's just a case of assembling the pieces then the AI can do it. It will produce 'vibe proofs' which are correct only by happy accident, but when you push it, it's actually OK at identifying where the issue is and will converge on the right answer. Unlike in the experiment, I wrote and rewrote large portions of the papers because Claude's default style is much too verbose for maths; I also had a coauthor verify all the computations and proofs independently.
Incidentally - that substack has AI-writing turned up to 11.
Today, Facebook recommended to me to add Sam Bankman-Fried as a friend, because we have many friends in common. I think I will pass, because he hasn't posted anything interesting recently.
If you are connected with many rationalists on Facebook, these things happen. Facebook seems desperate to connect you with as many people as possible, under any pretext.
The phone company wrote to me to say they’re upgrading the phone service from copper to fibre. Hooray! This is good. I would have hoped this would be straightforward, but…
The letter says my existing broadband service will cease to work and I need a new contract for fibre broadband. Fine. I phone the telco’s sales department, explain the situation, expect to agree to a broadband contract. They tell me broadband will be included in the new digital package (this isn’t true). Fine, I say, good that I don’t need to do anything although the letter you guys just sent me suggests that I do.
Some weeks pass. The telcos engineering department phones me. They tell me my broadband service will cease at the switchover to fibre. Discussion ensues. Ok, fine, I broadband isn’t included in the basic package. I check with the engineering guy if I need to cancel the old contract: no, they’ll cancel the old contract but need to talk to sales for the new contract.
I call sales (again), and explain the story, and ask, ok, can I pay for broadband please. A 45 minute phone conversation ensues, with lots of gaps where the sales person puts me on hold while they talk to the technical people. Eventually, sales person gets to the point where they are finishing work for the day and I’ll have to phone back tomorrow.
Like, how hard can it be?
What I was expecting to happen as like a five minute conversation where I say, sure, change my tariff from the old copper based rIf to the fibre one. But no, mit takes more than a day on the phone.
A few years back, I was taking to a different ISP, in respect of a different house, and they were giving me increasingly creative bogus reasons for why their Internet service wasn’t working. For example, they claimed it was because we were in the monsoon season. I’m in England; there is no monsoon season. I was seriously tempted to collect all their bogus excuses and write a funny article.
I didn't find a dedicated collection, but this is definitely a well-recognized phenomenon in the HN community. It even has an informal name — people sometimes call it "founder here" posts, after the telltale opening phrase companies use when they show up to do damage control. The pattern is so common it's become a bit of a meme.
The typical script goes:
* Someone posts a blog rant ("Company X destroyed my account / charged me / broke my data")
* It hits the front page because the HN crowd loves a good grievance story
* Within hours, a company rep (often the actual founder or CEO) shows up with a comment like "Hi, founder here — so sorry this happened, DM me and we'll make it right"
There doesn't seem to be a dedicated curated archive of these, which is a bit surprising given how common they are. A few things worth knowing though:
* The HN Algolia search API (hn.algolia.com) lets you search comments, so you could theoretically query for phrases like "founder here" or "CEO here" and find hundreds of examples yourself.
* The phenomenon is so expected that it's sometimes gamed — companies actually monitor HN for mentions and have someone ready to swoop in, which somewhat defeats the spontaneous charm of it.
* There's a related but funnier variant: when the company rep's response is defensive rather than apologetic, which usually makes things much worse in the comments.
Anyone had any luck doing research level math with LLMs? I tried only the free models for now to try to resolve some conjecture i couldn't prove from my phd a while back (i don't do research maths for my job now, so i disn't spend many hours on it) , and i found myself mostly spending time trying to detect the mistakes in the "proofs" it gave me. Sometimes they were obvious mistakes, sometimes more subtle.
I wonder if any active mathematicians had positive outcomes trying this.
I haven't personally -- but I track the field pretty closely. Most notably is probably Terence Tao. His blog outlines how he uses them, their strengths and weaknesses.
From what I can tell by following this closely, you need to move to the paid models if you want quality outputs, the free models are "lobotomized" (quantized) quite a bit -- they are pretty dumb. Try a 20$ per month subscription and use one of the frontier leading edge models: Claude Opus 4.6, ChatGPT 5.4, or Gemini 3.1 Pro.
I've written my last two papers with some AI assistance.
For one paper it was genuinely useful: it wrote Python code, asked me add some libraries and then it could do straightforward linear algebra and graph theory. Nothing I could not have done myself but it was faster than me. It spotted some patterns, proved some lemmas and cut down the size of some searches as a result. (The lemmas weren't correct the first few times.) No cutting edge proof writing though.
For the current paper, it's been able to do tasks like 'implement the methods in this other paper, conduct a search with python and verify that the objects you found satisfy all the axioms that they should satisfy'. It helps that the techniques have been used a few times before, and overlap with other well-studied areas.
From my experience, what it can do is essentially pattern matching - if I have 10 papers applying technique X to object Y, it can apply technique X' or search for object Y', possibly both but it gets harder to check correctness as you wander into more unfamiliar territory. It's good at writing code, and OK at writing proofs (they need careful checking and extensive rewriting). I phrase it this way deliberately - I've mostly focussed on asking the LLM to do things that I think it'll be good at, and I only give it tasks I can verify. So 'construct examples of X satisfying conditions Y_1, Y_2, Y_3' is a good task, because I can verify that the output is correct with a few lines of code. If it can't find X then I can drop a condition. Classify all X or prove non-existence of X is a bad task, because I need to convince myself that the proof is correct. Possibly it could be coded up in Lean as a demonstration of correctness, but I haven't tried that.
I find it hard to draw strong conclusions from the results. It seems that AI teams put extra effort into somehow customizing models for this challenge and it is hard to judge what this says about models that only had generic training. On the other hand, it seems impressive that some of the submitted answers are sufficiently reasonable that experts have to put meaningful work into checking them.
FWIW, I would benchmark myself at roughly 1st/2nd year grad student level. Of the 10 problems, only 2 of them (4 and 9) are completely comprehensible to me and one is nearly comprehensible (7.)
OK so we're now several weeks into the Iran war, and anti-war protests have been... actually I haven't heard about any. Looking it up there was a brief spurt of activity on day one, but nothing like the big protests we used to see about Iraq.
Cynics have often noted that anti-war movements crop up for wars started by Republicans but not Democrats. But this time it's a Republican who started a war, and the silence is a bit eerie.
Anti-war protests in the US tend to correlate with boots on the ground, which have tended to recently be more of a Republican-war thing than a Democrat-war thing and haven't happened yet in Iran.
No dog in this particular hunt, so I'll remark that political party generalizations probably have a shelf life of about a generation. The Democrats are no longer the party of LBJ (to say nothing of Wilson). They're barely even the party of Bill Clinton, and he's still alive and influential. Likewise for Republicans. Each group can certainly espouse positions held by their grandfathers, but I think that's not something we can bet on, especially when trying to pin down which positions _drive_ each group.
Obviously, we're talking less about party properties and more about properties of organizations reacting to those parties, but I think the same holds for them, largely due to changing memberships.
I agree, I also find this interesting. I think it could be apathy and tiredness. In 2003 we thought everything was improving there would be fewer and fewer wars. There was a good reason to protest. Now we might still hope for fewer and fewer wars eventually, but we recognize that crazy strongmen will sometimes just start wars and protesting them is a lot of work. So, we just don't bother anymore.
I guess the Iran war is also smaller than the Irak war as others have pointed out. But I'm still not sure why this is the case. I'm not surprised by it, if I had been asked a month ago how many protests there will be I would have guessed not that many, but I'm not sure why exactly.
No boots on the ground yet is probably significant. People are still holding out hope that Trump can find a way to climb down off the ledge.
Edit: I should also note that while the Iran war will be a disaster for the global economy, the US is likely to avoid the worst of it - the worst off will be countries that are net importers of food and oil, and America is lucky to not be in either category.
Most people I see protesting against the war in Ukraine are like: "Why can't Ukrainians stop fighting, and let Russians enjoy the conquered territories in peace?" They didn't protest in 2022.
Of course, I was at university and I remember there were plenty of protests against it before it even started. Then I have a distinct memory of the day it started, someone driving around campus with a megaphone trying to get people to go to a protest immediately.
edit: Actually I just remembered another distinct memory, I got into an argument with my girlfriend on Valentine's Day 2003 about an Iraq war protest; that was three weeks before the war started.
It will be funny if it really turns out it was USAID all along.
But yeah, this is the feeling I'm getting. Apparently-grassroots protests take a lot of coordination and effort, and whoever coordinates them is either unwilling or unable right now. I always thought that they were organised by all those far-left groups that are at the vanguard, but nope, this is what protests look like when those far left groups are actually organising it themselves -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/28/khamenei-killing-protests-us -- a few dozen people milling around outside the White House and even fewer in Times Square.
On why men do not read - well, why no one publishes 1970's style military science fiction anymore, Larry Nivel, Jerr Pournelle style, Prince of Mercenaries, Man-Kzin Wars etc. ? Why does it feel so DATED? MSF is quite probably the most male-brained thing ever, as it boils down to "aggressive engineering".
I re-read these books, and they are great, but something feels dated about them. But I cannot really say what.
Also, Pournelle was something between mildly libertarian and mildly conservative in real life, but in fiction absolutely nothing ideological, playing around with a lot of ideas, even a socialist commune in I think Footfall or Lucifer's Hammer. He made fun of libertarians in Red Heroine. Really no ideologue. But strangely the only one republishing one of his stores recently was the far-righter Vox Day?
Military science fiction can be fun, I assume, but it's pure schlock like romantasy, and it's meaningless whether people do or do not read it. Number of readers is not the metric to track, it's how many people are reading literature (as I recall, that number has always been a minority).
It is true newer literary novels have a tendency to be narcissistic, but that's not all of them. I can recommend The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt as an exception.
I love that “dated” feeling. Writers are so narcissistic today, they think everything is about feelings and sharing your trauma. It even leaks in to things that are for guys. I was reading a series set in Ancient Rome and the soldier wins a great battle. But instead of being excited, he gets all mopey and it kills the vibe. Who reads Ancient Rome fiction for the therapy talk? I’m almost finished with with my science fiction story and taking heavy inspiration from the Princess of Mars series made sure my characters were just as “dated”.
"Scipio, when he looked upon the city [Carthage] as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom... he said:
A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,
And Priam and his people shall be slain.
And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human."
From Polybius on the sack and destruction of Carthage.
Yes I’m aware of that quote and no, he wasn’t “traumatized” by having won. Scipio didn’t spend the rest of his life whining about the Punic wars. He came back home in triumph and advocated further conquests.
And which is more read - whatever letters he wrote advocating those conquests? Or Polybius?
If your thesis is that men don't read today because modern authors are too invested in sharing trauma, that's the relevant metric here. Not "how did Scipio actually feel," but "which telling of the story drew more readers."
It’s read because it’s prophetic, not because people want to read about trauma. And that quote has absolutely nothing to do with todays therapy culture or PTSD or anything like that. Scipio didn’t weep because he was wracked with guilt about what he did to Carthage but over what could happen to Rome. This was the norm throughout history. You celebrated your successes and commiserate your failures. People in the ancient world did not feel bad about winning battles.
Does the Expanse series count? I guess it's more of a political thriller set in space, but still, if you're looking for "aggressive engineering," it's got plenty of that.
Yeah, I think of The Expanse as at least having a lot of military SF flavor, including multiple space militaries and terrorist/guerilla groups each with their own tactics and doctrine and objectives.
FWIW, I really enjoyed the "Frontlines" series, by Marko Kloos. Yes, it has political commentary, but the commentary is delivered organically, not shoved in your face. No one ever pauses mid-combat to recite a rousing speech. In combat, the moment you hesitate you die.
I have enjoyed a lot of Pournelle’s work, but he’s written some books that read like RW propaganda. One is about a mercenary captain who is hired to defend a planet from horde of immigrants from Earth, and does so by luring them into a stadium and massacring them with artillery.
Yes, everybody mentions that, because that was very horrid and indeed RW propaganda like. But he was very flexible, Red Dragon criticizes libertarians, Lucifer’s Hammer goes as far as say that in disaster situations a socialist commune is a good idea, Janissaries is about introducing stuff like social mobility and meritocracy into a medieval world and so on.
I have been shocked over the past 3 years how many times I have found out that friends and colleagues of mine (generally male, ages 25-45) are reading red rising.
The book series is a fun read, but its breadth of popularity shocks me. I'm honestly excited by how many people say it's the first book series they've read in years.
Why the specific callout of the 70s? Now, it's been a long time since I read much Niven or Pournelle, and the Man-Kzin Wars seems likely to particularly annoy me because its most famous lesson is wrong, but there's people like David Drake and David Weber, to name two, who have been doing good Mil SF a lot more recently.
I also enjoy Drake and Weber, and would add SM Stirling, Eric Flint, Timothy Zahn, and John Ringo. Probably Harry Turtledove as well, although more of his stuff is Alternate History or Fantasy rather than straight Sci Fi.
I like most of those authors too, but the OP specified military SF, and at least by my (admittedly exacting) standards, none of those are really doing that. I have more thoughts at https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Flavor-of-the-Military.
For instance a clearer understanding of gender roles - or at least our fantasies of them.
>and the Man-Kzin Wars seems likely to particularly annoy me because its most famous lesson is wrong
Which one? Inventive monkey defeats one-trick tiger who only knows frontal assault?
> David Drake and David Weber
I don't know Drake, but Weber is horrible, he casts a woman into a role that is such an absolutely typical male fantasy, ruining the whole thing. A woman military officer with the first name Honor...
I am not going the usual "not realistic" route, anything could be realistc. It is rather just not how our fantasies work. Honor Harrington as a female John Christian Falkenberg absolutely fucks up our fantasies, because we fantasize about being John Christian Falkenbergs because that is how we think we become better at being men. If a woman can be JCF and HH is like that, then it is completely worthless for the purpose of imagining us as better men.
And this is what was understood in the 1970's, that our fantasies are more "sexist" than reality is. Reality probably has plenty of women who are good military officers. But it is not cool the same way in a fantasy. Fantasy is about gendered idealism, and a female Aragorn or a male Arwen really fucks up that fantasy.
I have no problem with women in combat roles, especially when her role is "commander of the fleet" and not "front-line infantry". That said though, I couldn't really get into the "Honor" novels past the first few books. They just felt like each book was getting slower and slower, until I found myself skipping pages.
I would say Weber is horrible for other reasons. I've read two of his books, and in both of them the heroes win by simply showing up. In one of them, they won without even showing up; we spend the whole book following the shadowy mastermind villain, and then the dude dies from the magic equivalent of stepping on a landmine.
I mean, if that's your justification for sinking a vessel returning from peacetime exercises, without warning, you have no grounds for protest when an enemy does basically anything. Anything which would previously have been classified as a terrorist attack is now legitimate.
It is more about ideals than norms. Norms are things that are more or less mandatory for everybody, ideals are something only few can reach, but are inspiring.
It *is* true that super high delta v drives as frequently found in space opera are necessarily weapons of mass destruction: just crash a big spaceship or its payload into a planet at high speed. But that's not the scenario presented in "The Kzinti Lesson" and your objections definitely apply.
Another similar thing that pops up repeatedly in SF (since archimedes, I guess) is using big or numerous mirrors reflecting sunlight as a replacement for lasers. Conservation of radiance *severely* limits the capability of these systems but the author usually doesn't know this...
Eh, it's not too late to burn down society and reestablish the patriarchy, right? Seems he has plenty of potential like-minded accomplices to work with nowadays...
…if what you’re really looking for is gender role stereotypes from several generations ago, perhaps that explains why the examples seem so very dated when you find them? With decades of visceral stories from Alien to Fury Road and all in between entering our zeitgeist, in today’s world it is much harder to suspend disbelief for tropes that relegate half the human race to damsel-in-distress roles.
Bujold is great, although I don't think her style can be classified as "MilSF". Her protagonists usually (though admittedly not always) win by personal guile, not leadership or physical prowess in pitched battle.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the "Miles Vorkosigan" series -- but nonetheless they are very different in style from e.g. the "Honor Harrington" series and other typical MilSF.
Do men not read? Is new MSF not being published? As a man who reads, and has recently read newly published MSF (albeit on kindle unlimited and it wasn’t very good), I feel like both claims need substantiating.
When I reread SF I used to enjoy decades ago, I generally find them naive and dated. This is for several reasons: I’ve grown up a bit since then, the world has changed (it’s very hard to tell stories where governments and their military adventures are an unambiguous force for good that the participants can be proud of in 2026!), and generally few things date as rapidly as predictions of what the future will look like.
I always heard, and have an impression, that America has and has always had a very anti-intellectual mainstream culture, so it's not a surprise Americans don't read.
Whenever I dig into this observation about American anti-intellectualism, I invariably find it's being made by an intellectual.
Meanwhile, when I dig into the argument for why this is bad, it invariably boils down to the argument that intellectuals are knowledgeable, and knowledge is an unqualified good. However, knowledge possessed by intellectuals is not the sum total of knowledge, which includes things like how to fix equipment, how to hunt for food, how to play the guitar, how to persuade someone to buy your widgets, or even how to win at poker.
Curiously, plenty of the latter type of knowledge _can_ be found in books, and such books are indeed avidly read by Americans. It's just that plenty of it is better transferred through a combination of oral communication and the implacable force of Trial and Error, which probably explains why some portion of Americans spend more time with mentorships and trying things than with reading.
I think pragmatic know-how is not the same as intellectual knowledge, which is largely about involvement in things other than solving small-scale problems. Intellectual knowledge would include things like knowing how things work at a deep level, I would also include consciousness-expanding art in it.
I think that's a very odd definition. Pragmatic knowledge still includes a lot of large-scale problems, such as building bridges or managing large businesses, and a lot of intellectual knowledge includes knowledge that has nothing to do with deep understanding of real-world systems. The best way I know of to distinguish between large-scale pragmatic intellectual knowledge and non-pragmatic intellectual knowledge is to just call them "pragmatic" and "non-pragmatic", and in every forum I've seen, the latter just rounds off to "intellectual".
> FWIW I'm a man, and the only men I know who read are immigrants like me. None of the US-born Americans I know read anything, not even comics.
Humorously enough, I have the exactly reversed pattern - I'm American and read like it's going out of style, and most of my male friends are immigrants and none read.
I think male readers in general are just exceptions. And female readers are essentially 90% werewolf porn, so by some standards, it doesn't really count.
To be fair, I'm an english-as-second-language immigrant too. Most of my native-born male friends here in the UK do read a lot, but I guess that's self-selecting and not necessarily indicative of the population as a whole, which I wouldn't have intuitions for.
I think it is a general Eastern European (former Commie Block, etc.) thing, we (Hungary) used to have a quite large SF scene in the 90s, and it is still somewhat alive.
We do, it is true, but actually my friends are Korean, Mexican, and otherwise miscellaneous. It seems that everyone loves science fiction (and fantasy) besides Americans...
Sure, but some of the Great sci Fi didn't take the goodness of God and country as a given. Starship Troopers as a direct exploration of this very idea, and some of the more bleak series like Flandry of Terra outright admit that the protagonist's loyalty to country is probably misguided.
I feel like military science fiction has actually regressed a lot in some ways. Most of the military SF I see in bookstores these days seems to follow a pattern of a square jawed hero going up against a dastardly alien race that knows only conquest.
What turned me off Pournelle -- and that was back in 1990's, -- was essentially WWII tactics in his Falkenberg Legion books. He justified it with (quoting by memory) "smart munitions had swept manned aircraft from the sky", which immediately made me think "Why can't these same smart munitions hunt targets on the ground?"
The answer of course, is that it would have prevented Pournelle from writing the stories he wanted to write. And now in Ukraine we have a real life demonstration of how these "smart munitions" actually transform war.
In the Star Trek world, a safe that had to be secure would presumably include a small shield generator to prevent a transporter from being used to take the contents of the safe.
If you think that's bad, consider the full implications of Star Trek replicators and hard-light projections (i.e. the so-called "holograms"). These technologies alone (i.e. even ignoring transporters) should've made the setting of Star Trek almost completely unrecognizable.
> The Ferengi and their "gold pressed latinum" -- either they're completely delusional and it's replicatable, or they're not, and that borks the economy in other ways.
True, but the economy in Star Trek is already pretty borked.
> Before then, they were self-contained (which, while still problematic in a Groundhog's Day simulation sort of way...)
Granted, limiting the "holograms" to the interior of a relatively large device (the holodeck) does solve some problems -- but not all of them. Learning things isn't the main issue; it is dwarfed by the implications of software-defined architecture and "virtual" volumes that are functionally equivalent to space compression, not to mention the fact that "holographic" constructs need not obey the laws of physics.
I am struggling with a philosophical problem, what our terminal goals should be, yes, superintelligence alignment or just regular political philosophy.
My first instinct is compassion - eliminate suffering. But if we do that, we turn the entire society into a boring hospital ward where dancing is not allowed, as you might break a leg.
Or we maximize happiness - but what is happiness? Pleasure? Welcome to wireheading and lotus eaters.
Note that the great Eric Raymond had a good argument here: a lotus eater society is very vulnerable to any kind of shock. True pleasure-maximization lies in people being able to cope with adversity, hardship, which means less present pleasure-maximization. OK but if that society is super powerful through superintelligent technology, it is no longer necessary. Then?
Or happiness is flourishing? But what IS flourishing, isn't it just a bullshit word?
My basic intution of a flourishing society is one that creates great, even heroic science, technology, art, sports etc. But what FOR?`
Isn't that goal (vitalism) actually aesthetic? That is our terminal goal is a society in which a lot of lives are worthy of the movie screen or the Iliad type epic poem, simply admirable?
Is it ethically allowable to optimize for aesthetic goals?
But on the other hand aren't all ethical goals deep down aesthetic: we do not want to be evil Sauron, because that is ugly, and we want to be fair and just Gondor, because that is beautiful?
What do we have at the deep end of ethics but disgust over the ugliness of evil? A hateful face is ugly, a greedy face is ugly, a kindly face is beautiful, like that?
Or maybe aesthetic goals are OK, because aesthetics is not subjective: we admire things because those things are actually, objectively good?
In that case, maybe we need a god? Like humans making science or art is objectively good, because creating things imitates god?
We just need the ASI to raise both the floor and ceilings for humans. Raise the floor by healing all physical and mental illnesses, and that's it, no hacking of our preferences or something. Raise the ceiling by fully figuring out how the universe works. We don't need it to make art, unless it turns out it can make some kind of amazing art works that turn everyone into better people.
ik we discussed this recently, but let me try a different angle.
Heraclitus was right. The world is flux. Platonism was a mistake. But Platonism became popular anyway, because the illusion of certainty is computationally tractable, and because uncertainty begets anxiety. I.e. "flux" is antimemetic, AKA unmarketable, ergo "worse is better" [0]. Instead of chasing the feeling of certainty, consider adapting to the environment.
> what our terminal goals should be, yes, superintelligence alignment or just regular political philosophy.
There are three classical answers to this that avoid the paths and pitfalls you've identified.
Come into Big Bob's Discount Metaphysics Emporium and let me show you some of the exciting new models we have today.
What are forces that are larger than human, operate over deep time, and have markedly improved the states of qualia and consciousness available to living beings, and thus have credence for being universal-scale goods?
1. First contender - Complexification. The greatest good is that which makes the universe more complex, less entropic, more information per unit volume, etc. This is basically Gregory David Roberts' answer in Shantaram. People advancing science, creating companies, creating art? All making existence more complex, all good. People destroying art, companies, technologies? Reduces complexity in the world, a bad thing.
2. Second contender - sophotransmogrification. The greatest good is that which creates more thinking matter in the universe. Too much of the universe is dead, and doesn't think, and that doens't do anybody any good! Making more people? Good. Making AI? Better, more scaleable. Eventually making godlike pan-galactic intelligences? Now we're talking! This is John C. Wrights conceit in his Count to the Eschaton sequence. The universe where sophotransmogrification is an ultimate good is also a simulation created out of waste-heat or waste-cpu processes of some sort of much more Hylaean and utopic "real" universe, so the greater amount of thinking was serving yet another higher purpose (namely this universe's survival and continuation).
3. Bringing your universe closer to ultimate truth and understanding - the Platonic or Hylaean Theoric World as posited in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, in which he posits a multiverse of closer and farther (or up-wick and down-wick) universes, which participate in greater or lesser epistemic purity and closeness to capital "T" Truth, which our sciences peer through glass darkly to see rare glimpses and scattered pieces of. Science and engineering being the active practice of ultimate good in this schema.
You'll note that being closer to Platonic Truth in theory and execution has a great resemblance to greater complexification, which also seems to be taking us in a journey of greater sophotransmogrification (whether through spreading Humans or AI's though the future light cone is still to be determined).
I think any of these three have a pretty good case for being an "ultimate good" that you could attach meaning to in your own life and actions - they're all after all much greater than ourselves, have been existing or occuring over billions of years, and arguably end in much better and more interesting universes than we currently inhabit. So why not?
Oh, and also, for Simulationists (and seriously, what time period is most likely to be simulated than that time a bunch of tarted-up apes accidentally gave birth to a god?) - you'll note that with greater complexification and sophotransmogrification, both are likely ultimate "goods" in the sense of "making the simulation contain more interesting stuff," and thus helping forestall the incipient cancellation of our second season.
Even getting closer to Truth probably has some value in a "Ha, they're breaking the third wall now in this drama!" sort of way.
For AI accelerationists, you'll note that these also all tend to accelerate AI and lead unambiguously to the conditions for larger, grander minds.
Truly, there's something for everyone at Big Bob's Discount Metaphysics Emporium!
All these schools of thought about what is the best human life or the best world seem like category errors to me. They use the kind of categories that work well at dog shows -- best of breed, best of show. But how can you apply them to life, to the universe? Life and the universe seem intricate and obviously meaningless to me (though often fun and interesting).
> All these schools of thought about what is the best human life or the best world seem like category errors to me. They use the kind of categories that work well at dog shows -- best of breed, best of show. But how can you apply them to life, to the universe?
I thought they apply pretty readily to individual lives?
More complex / higher information / less compressible lives - a life where more interesting conversations, things, and experiences happen. A life where you're more engaged and pay more attention. Just like experiences are more intense and memorable when younger vs older, because when you're older you've done everything already and more of your life is routine, lives with more things going on per unit time are more memorable and engaging and overall better. Think of the lives people envy - busy stars, executives, athletes - all seem to be representing this.
More sophotransmogrification - having more kids, literally bringing more minds like you into the universe, arguably one of the biggest life satisfication measures - only 7-11% of parents say they'd have 0 kids if they could do it all over again at age 45. Parents in general are more fullfilled, less neurotic, and have notable buffs to "meaning" in their lives vs non-parents.
Being closer to the truth - we're commenting on the biggest Rationalist blog that exists. Presumably we all have a higher-than-median dedication to this, and think it's a better way. But having a better apprehension of the truth allows you to understand more, make better decisions, to predict better, and to achieve more in your life, which loops back to 1, and for some people, even augments 2.
And at the universe level, isn't it trivially obvious that a universe with more thinking minds trying to see more truthfully and doing more interesting, less compressible things is pretty much definitionally better than a cold and empty universe unfolding towards a clockwork destination composed of dumb matter fully predictably following the laws of physics?
It's the only remedy I see to "we're irrelevant specks in a cold and uncaring universe that's mostly about hydrogen and helium, so nothing matters, do whatever you want," and seems like a pretty reasonable and defensible better answer.
Why do we even need terminal goals? That’s the problem with contemporary philosophy. Many of them just go “what’s The Good, how do I optimize for The Good, ok now I just broke everything so how do I patch it”. Just think about the kind of behavior we want to promote and how to enforce it. The idea that we’re going to come up with an equation that will deterministically work in all cases is nonsense.
The issue is, that if we are talking political philosophy, behavior-promoting is inherently conservative. Like for example if we wanted to promote healthy lifestyles, we would cut any kind of taxpayer-paid healthcare option.
The Cult of Reason was a religion that arose during the middle of the French Revolution. It was intended to replace Catholicism. In my mind, it represents an example of how people behave when they're living through the collapse of a political/religious order. Viz. they take the hip & cool thing (Reason) and elevate it into a terminal value. (Hmm... does any of this remind you of the modern era?)
When I said "majesty and splendor", I was being facetious. The whole affair was short-lived and a bit cringe. Which is probably why nobody talks about it anymore. It ruins a certain narrative, if you know what I mean.
Is the Eric Raymond argument (which I haven't heard) something about lotus eater societies not resulting in much long-term happiness because they would collapse from some threat?
I think that for "maximize happiness" it matters a lot how we define *whose* happiness we're maximizing, especially if we're considering hypothetical artificial (super)intelligences. "lotus eater society is very vulnerable to any kind of shock" is trivially solvable if the agents/subjects of sustaining that happiness society are not the same as the patients/objects of maximizing happiness; the people can safely be lotus eaters if artificial non-conscious agents with undefined (and thus irrelevant) happiness are the ones who are able to cope with adversity and hardship and resist any shock; a community of hyper-aggressive paranoid machines eliminating any possible threats to the New World Order and converting the universe into unimaginably large farms of wireheaded lotus eaters is an actual solution to "maximize happiness" even if you want to account for risks and vulnerabilities of lotus eater societies. So if that feels Wrong, we probably have to concede that we don't really want to maximize happiness but rather something else (e.g. as Ian Banks novels about Culture society has such major-threat-preventing machines doing similar but quite different things).
Yes. Raymond is the rugged individualist type, and not only in theory, he modeled his life after Robert Heinlein, and learned all kinds of things from martial arts to shooting, because he thinks he is responsible for is own survival and that of his loved ones. He is a frontiersman type. An unashamed hedonist, but puts limits on it for this reason.
Which reminds me of a story. Someone said that the old British ideal of suffering in silence, not complaining, stiff upper lip was invented, because if you can 10 amounts of hardship not complaining, then you can 20 with complaining. If you complain at 10, you would give up at 20.
So long-term, intelligent hedonism can require a lot of short-term hardship.
What you say, well, with sufficiently advanced technology everything is possible, but the protector agents are human, they will inevitably become an extractive ruling class. That is how warrior nobility always worked. With AI/robots, we are back to the hard problem of alignment.
In my view, all morality bottoms out in the reproductive fitness of the societies which adopt it. If you accept both that moral rules materially affect the health of a culture and that morality is transmitted intergenerationally, then it follows that morality is shaped by selection effects. I think that the best way to operationalize the concept of cultural reproductive fitness is to equate it to long-term economic output. That's why western enlightenment values are ascendent in the world. Might ultimately makes right and the western model of individual liberty plus free markets has proven to be the most economically powerful social model over the past few centuries. Possibly AI will change that in the near future, but that remains to be seen.
In my view it doesn't really matter what we think morality should or shouldn't be. It will inevitably become whatever the selective forces of cultural evolution dictate. Those forces aren't amenable to human oversight or control. Whichever moral system catalyzes the most economic output will ultimately prevail.
Literal reproductive fitness seems to me very callous and very conservative. As maximizing reproductive fitness leads to the kind of society where everybody has as many children as they can maintain at just the edge of abject poverty, parenting takes an immense amount of time and there is no fun or hedonism. Quite honestly it sounds like the worst idea. Also, that kind of society would not even have much science, art or beauty. It would look a lot like India or Sub-Saharan Africa.
OK you mean not literal reproductive fitness but cultural or economical. That is better, but pointless, why import a biological concept into a very different field?
Are you really sure that Western Enlightenment values are ascended in the world? This is a separate topic, but very interesting, because I see the opposite. In the past, the Third World, coveting the wealth and power of the West, tended to cargo-cult emulate such values, such as democracy or human rights, hoping it leads somehow to wealth and power. But China now succesfully showed that economic success does not actually depend on those values. It merely depends on a government not stupid about economics, but otherwise it can be authoritarian, it can give no fucks about the human rights of the Falun Gong or Muslim people. And as long as people get richer, it is stable, they do not demand democracy. So every authoritarian in the Third World sees that with relief, all they have to do is to not be stupid about economics, and they do not need to import any other Western values that are alien to their culture and would threaten their rule.
>why import a biological concept into a very different field?
Why not? Morality is about human behavior and humans are biological, after all. If you want to ask grand questions about what human goals should be then I think you need to ground that discussion in the reality of what we are.
>Are you really sure that Western Enlightenment values are ascended in the world?
I mean, the 20th century is called the American Century for a reason. You have to go pretty far down the list of per capita GDP countries to find a non-western one. Virtually the entirety of the modern world is derived from western innovations. Even communism is a western invention. The US and Europe are less dominant now because the rest of the world is catching up a bit, but we're still way out in front. If NATO collectively decided to go full Alexander the Great on the non-nuclear world then there wouldn't really be anyone to stop us except our own consciences.
China is an interesting question, though I'll point out that it only escaped poverty by adopting western markets. Their model (authoritarian politics, open markets) might prove to be the superior system, though I suspect it will be less adaptable over the long haul than more open systems. But who knows, time will tell.
My point is the 21st century isn't all that different from the 20th. Yes, China is catching up. That's what backwards countries do when they industrialize: they converge with other industrialized countries. That doesn't mean Western hegemony is over.
Over a long enough time horizon, we are both dead. Over a longer one, the sun goes out. Over an even longer horizon, all energy in the universe is converted into waste heat.
Why should the waste heat death of the universe, or apparently morality, prevent me from caring about its state before that? I'm going to die and become dust eventually, so why not break my own legs with a hammer?
What if a quirk of technology meant that the most economic output was captured by sacrificing all first born children to Moloch? Do you suddenly not care? Suppose you could delay the onset of this final morality to which all moralities will eventually succumb by a year. A full year, during which the prevailing attitudes towards right and wrong will be guided by normal forces.
But there is a catch. You have to call someone to do it, and the only phone available is a pay phone. It costs like a dollar these days. You aren't starving, you have plenty of dollars. You don't even have anything mind. But still, a dollar is a dollar.
Now, you'd obviously pay the dollar. Would you be willing to solve a hard math problem? Write a beautiful poem? Spend a whole life striving?
Saying that the real forces aren't amenable to human control, (even granting an ultimate and unchangeable destination which I don't), is ignoring the many times humans did, in fact, carve an enduring sentence or two into whole civilizations.
Heck, lets go the other way round. Do you think parents should teach children right from wrong? Is it pointless? Do you think they should carefully consider the lessons they impart? If moral philosophy is valuable when n=1, and pointless when n=8 billion, is there an n where the sign flips?
> I'm going to die and become dust eventually, so why not break my own legs with a hammer?
That is a good question. Why don't you? The answer is that it was never a choice you could make in the first place. Understand that you are a product of selection, just like everything else. You care about these things because you must, and you will serve your part whether you succeed or fail.
My view is compatible with conventional morality. That's because conventional morality is, in fact, largely adaptive. How could it be otherwise? If our moral instincts didn't confer a selective advantage then they never could have evolved in the first place. When you look at the history of moral evolution it pretty clearly follows economic reality. Sexual morality loosened after hormonal birth control lessened the risk of pregnancy, women got the vote only after widespread industrialization decoupled economic productivity from physical strength, strong individual rights only arose after the economic output of the common man became significant enough to be worth protecting. That pattern repeats over and over. I'm not saying that morality isn't important, only that it's contingent.
Your objection strikes me as analogous to a Christian who, upon hearing about evolution for the first time, is incredulous that our physical forms were created for mere reproductive success rather than in the image of the Creator. "What if a quirk in evolution meant that eating one's mate increased reproductive fitness?" Gee, I dunno, ask the Preying Mantis.
>What if a quirk of technology meant that the most economic output was captured by sacrificing all first born children to Moloch? Do you suddenly not care?
I'll point out that pre-contact Tahitians did essentially that: they killed three-fourths of all newborns as a form of birth control. That kept their population from outstripping their food supply and kept them relatively rich by pre-industrial standards. The English sailors who first discovered them were amazed at their standard of living, which was much higher than England's. I'm confident that if you had been born into that society that you would have had no problem with it.
Morality is pragmatic and contingent, not deontological. And yes I think that means that AGI could radically change what the world thinks of as moral if it upends our economic reality.
"Sacrifices to Moloch" was chosen deliberately, I know that child sacrifice isn't actually beyond the pale of human morality. Though the bit about Tahiti was new to me, thanks for the bit of history.
I agree with you that I'm no grand moral mutant who would always rise above the mores of the society around me. I'm a basically normal member of my current society, I assume I would be a basically normal member of Tahitian society. My point is, even in the face of that, I still actually care about the values I have. That's just an empirically true fact. My question that was rhetorical is now literal. Would you spend a dollar to keep the people around you, or even yourself, from thinking that sacrificing children to Moloch was fine, even if it only lasted a year?
Assuming your answer is yes, basic moral philosophy becomes necessary more or less immediately. The sort of questions that Carlos was asking up above become necessary almost immediately.
Now, its possible that where all that philosophizing will lead you is indeed "make society survive", and you will only pay the dollar if you believe that it will help society survive.
Of course you care about the values you have. So do I! But I'm self-aware enough to realize that those feelings are culturally conditioned. Our feelings aren't really good evidence for how morality functions.
>Would you spend a dollar to keep the people around you, or even yourself, from thinking that sacrificing children to Moloch was fine
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Can you repackage it as a realistic scenario? One could argue that Southeast Asian sweatshops are examples of children being sacrificed to Moloch, I think. Does that count? Because I would not, in fact, pay a dollar to stop that from happening, at least in the narrow sense that I would refuse to pay a dollar more for a shirt that was made in non-sweatshop conditions, though isn't exactly the same question. 'Moloch' is a little vague as a philosophical device and so I can't really give a better answer than that. I certainly don't think that either sweatshops or child labor are immoral in an absolute sense.
But I suspect that all of this is largely moot. Moral preferences are shaped by the economic reality in which one is raised and those change all the time. I'm sure many realities of modern life would be abhorrent to the typical 18th century American - does that mean our lifestyle is immoral? Economic development drives morality and so it doesn't really make much of a difference what anyone has to say about it.
People in Southeast Asia are working in sweatshops because it's far better than their previous alternatives, things like subsistence farming - if someone would pay a dollar to stop that from happening, they'd be paying a dollar to harm that person by dooming them to a life worse than that sweatshop.
My intuition is that "do whatever you want" tends to lead to a lot of suffering as people destroy themselves - even if you limit it to "don't hurt others". It is also pretty much impossible to not hurt others to some degree while living a normal life. So you need to touch on what level of hurting others is justified. I think ideally we need something like a perfect compulsary education (or possibly the choice between several schools) that teaches how to live a fullfilling and joyful life, before allowing the do what you want. How we achieve that, I have no idea.
So shooting heroin until you die is fine and moral? Left to their own devices, teenagers will wind up pregnant with children that they won't be able to take care of. Surely you understand the failure modes of extreme permissiveness. "Do what you want" is reasonable advice on the margin, but only in the context of a functional society in which most people *don't* do that.
Yes. The problem with heroin addiction is not that it is immoral, but that, contrary to popular imagination, heroin is not wireheading and most long-term heroin addicts are not having a good time. Few not-otherwise-suicidal people want to shoot heroin until they die, and few teenagers want to end up pregnant and have kids they can't take care of.
Restrictive standards of "morality" can put a band-aid on these issues, sometimes, at the cost of side effects sometimes worse than the problems they were meant to solve. The real solution is to develop technology to augment human freedom. This worked quite well for teen pregnancy: widespread availability of birth control and abortion, free with no parental permission required, works extremely well at preventing teens from ending up with unwanted kids.
I'm not going to speculate on whether you need a god, because it's quite hard to believe in things you don't actually believe in, but I do believe in a God and (I will admit) have been staring at your post and blinking a lot in a certain amount of shock at... it's hard to explain. The possibilities that are excluded, perhaps, when one doesn't have that mental framework of belief?
... why did you forget to speculate about maximizing love? Or had you pre-excluded for reasons I can't see?
Oh, I never even thought about love, as I generally feel very little love for people incl. myself, this is the main reason why I cannot have faith, as then I would have to believe we are made in the image of something good, which sounds impossible to me. Killer apes evolving intelligence so to kill each other better seems about more realistic to me.
Yeah, I guess such misanthropy could leave out elements. I was thinking about in what kind of world I would like to live in. One thing I do not really care about if other sacks of shit love this sack of shit I call myself.
OK. What would even the point of maximizing love, I mean, what does a love-maximizer actually do?
Out of love, they maximize other people's happiness or minimize other people's suffering? I mean that is what the Buddhist kind of love/compassion does, and that is the only one I can understand, because it's real deep down goal is to do that to oneself. But then we are back to the original problem?
Or is it just... purposeless love, love for the sake of love, is there even such a thing?
> Killer apes evolving intelligence so to kill each other better seems about more realistic to me
I think this isn't actually true, we are a social omnivorous species, not solitary carnivores like tigers. I think we primarily evolved intelligence to survive in nature, part of that was about sustaining a thriving tribe.
There are also spiritual paths that do not depend on faith. The various Buddhisms are one such path, Sufism is another.
My primary position regarding both the universe and spirituality, for example, is not faith, it's that our brains are very limited and we should therefore avoid claiming we can understand the whole enchilada totally.
Well, that is the flaw in the direction I took the discussion in: I don't know what a love-maximizer would do, because I can't say I understand the "maximizing" process or perspective. Awhile back I went through a mental process where I... accepted my place in the world, one might say? I began to question how I, personally, should live, rather than how the world should be run. A lot of people might disapprove of this as a copout but it was actually quite mentally freeing. But that's just a long way of saying I can't answer that question.
BUT I can hopefully answer the one about the point of maximizing love, or the point of love itself.
At the beginning of your first post you speculate about taking the minimizing of suffering or the maximizing of pleasure to their logical extremes which are two different kinds of nightmares. What I kept thinking was that love would exclude those extremes. If you love someone, you... well, you have a certain amount of common sense about what you want for them! Now I am using the Christian theological definition of love, which is desiring someone else's good. (And I realize that opens a can of worms, what is good for a person?? To gesture at the general direction of my thought on that, I'm going to say: to act rightly and enjoy one's life.) But honestly garden-variety human affection mostly does pretty decently at this sort of balance too. I can see instinctively (or perhaps because I've had what I consider a balanced moral education?) that maximizing my 12-year-old's pleasure or minimizing his pain would not lead to his growing up a good or happy person. I want him to have a reasonably abundant amount of pleasure that is fully balanced as to its types (not ONLY the pleasure of video games but also those of learning, a job well done, a good choice made) and I want to limit his pain strictly to what he can fairly quickly recover from and learn from. A balance, in other words.
I really don't know if I am explaining this well. But the other thing I see is that when humans care for each other (I'm excluding things that people call love but that end up being exploitation of course), they derive a type of pleasure *from* that that is inherently balanced, not vulnerable to extremes analogous to wireheading etc. A type that's more stable, grounded and renewable long-term. (And if we want to talk about society, a society in which there are more individuals who actively care about their family, friends and neighbors is *definitely* more resilient.)
On a more personal note, I'll tell you honestly, killer apes evolving etc has at some points sounded more realistic to me as well, but the view of the world that that offers is straight-up unlivable to me. (And I could never get with the rosier versions of atheism, at all...) Thinking that rationality might require me to adopt it (which I no longer think, but was afraid might be true at some point) was very painful. So--clearly, we're very different people.
But, listen... still, I do recommend love. Non-romantic caring, both the giving and receiving of it. It makes you feel less like a sack of shit. At least I know it does that for me. (I'm not just stealing your phrasing here, this reflects my experience pretty closely.)
I must add, this is a fascinating discussion, but I'm sick today and this post appears to be about all I had in me. At least in terms of long posts, and I can't help wanting to do big questions justice, as best I can. Cheers and I hope you find everything you're looking for.
For a fairly large state Missouri has a surprisingly low, under-the-radar profile. I attribute this to several factors:
- Missouri is no longer important in national politics. While it was once a swing state, in the last couple decades it’s turned almost entirely Republican. This means the Democrats consider it a hopeless case and the Republicans take it for granted.
- Its two major cities are both right on borders and therefore their influence is shared with other states. In fact one of the cities shares its name with an adjacent state and its best suburbs are in that state. Its top city for tourism also is quite close to a border.
- The super dynamic and prosperous Northwest Arkansas region is a bit too far from the state line to have any significant spillover effects in Missouri.
- Its capital city is comparatively small and little-known.
- Missouri lacks any glamorous trendy cities like Austin, Nashville or Columbus.
- There are no longer any airline hubs in the state.
- The state university is not a powerhouse in football or basketball.
- Most of all, Missouri has no regional identity. In some respects it’s part of the South and in others part of the Midwest, but does not fully belong to either.
I had never been to Missouri (aside from very briefly as a toddler) until last summer. I spent a couple of days in KC, then drove down I-70 and spent a couple days in St. Louis.
I had some excellent barbecue in KC, although that was actually in Kansas at Slap's. In St. Louis I ate at Imo's Pizza. I'm not going to say it was terrible, but let's just say that St. Louis is not one of the top regional pizza styles in the US.
KC suffers from the 1970s disease of sticking the football/baseball stadiums way outside of downtown. The WWI Museum is very good, but not as good as the WWII Museum in New Orleans.
St. Louis felt very similar to New Orleans and Memphis. It was much more Southern than I expected.
I think you're right about most of the factors. Although, I'd be curious as about how exactly one would measure "what states you hear about" relative to others.
The only thing I remember about Missouri is their lax liquor laws (you can buy hard liquor in gas stations, for instance); that and wondering why KC hasn't had more urban renewal compared to other cities (the extremely tight belt of interstates around downtown probably isn't helping).
I wrote the report over 20 years ago. I do remember being surprised that they had the time to mail an envelope full of pamphlets to some elementary schooler in southern California in response to a letter. I guess every state must have this to some extent.
Not only does it share half its two major cities with another state, it has to share half its name with another state. As a kid growing up in another country it took a long time before I understood that Missouri and Mississippi were different places, that Missourah is not in fact a real place, and that Missoula is somewhere completely different (I was about to say it's in Toronto but no, that's Missisauga).
Because the entire state is basically trailer parks and ghetto with tweaked out farmers and truckers between them all buying off Ozark hillbilly cooks. Misery has absolutely nothing going for it, people, culture, economy, weather, geography, etc.
Lived outside Columbia on VV between '80-'88 and most of my immediate and extended family still live all over the state; I visit every year and was just out near Macon a couple weeks ago. We got deep roots going way back, we even founded a town east of Jefferson City back in the 1870s. 95% of our clan still lives in Misery, couple thousand of them at this point, all from the same immigrant couple back in the 1850s. I'm pretty up on the state. KC and Branson are outliers. The entire state is trash, literally can't think of one that even gives it a good run outside maybe Arkansas.
Last week, Australian entrepreneur Paul Conyngham developed a personalized mRNA vaccine for his dog and prominently credited ChatGPT. Naturally, "ChatGPT used to make custom cancer treatment" made its rounds online, and was the subject of significant discourse between AI pessimist and AI optimist groups.
How impressive was Conyngham's accomplishment? Is this evidence that AI is revolutionizing medicine? And are mRNA vaccines extremely cool? (Yes). I addressed these questions in a fairly technically detailed blog post, which I recommend to anyone interested in mRNA: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/did-paul-conyngham-really-use-ai
My main take is that Conyngham's story is an example of AI behaving as a normal technology. "AI" played a modest role in the development of personalized mRNA technology. ChatGPT was genuinely helpful to Conyngham, but not revolutionary, and was not a replacement for human expertise.
Let's say my eyes are spaced too closely together. It is unattractive. If I have a child with a woman whose eyes are spaced too far apart (also unattractive), will we have a child whose eyes have the normal spacing (attractive)? Is that how inheritance of human bone and muscle structure works? If yes, is there science behind it?
My monthly round up of the best long form links is out.
Includes analysis of the closing era of mass literacy, the end of mass bureaucracy, physical economy analysis of the war in Iran and its consequences, evidence human evolution sped up 10kya, a glimpse into the fragile US munitions industry, evidence of writing pushed back 40kya, how an AI generated podcast topped the charts,
And a plug to my own interview with James Howard Kunstler, and his appearance on my podcast, along with environmental journalist Fred Pearce and data crunching actuary turned physical economist Gail Tverberg.
I'm curious if people here know about/of Deep Springs College. The higher education and generally philanthropic outlook of the community would say 'more than the average person', but I'd guess the base rate is like 1/100, and I am not sure how much more often the place would be known here.
Sounds like their motto could be "A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not of the Spring" (Maybe a bit long for a motto though, and doesn't scan very well with the word "Pierian" removed!)
I have a friend who studied there in the early 2000s, and I heard a little bit about his time there. Sounded like a great and valuable experience for people much smarter and better motivated than me. We met at a gifted summer program but this sounded like a different level. I'm glad it exists, if my sense of it is accurate.
Heard secondhand, but a lot of cowboy behavior that used to be okay in a men-only setting -- like getting in shouting matches over your interpretation of a text, or banging your fist on the table to object to something, or using especially colorful language to disagree with someone -- ended up not being okay anymore when women are in the room. Maybe understandably: men can escalate in those ways around each other, in a way that feels unsafe, threatening, or dangerous to women. Better? Worse? Up to your interpretation!
I wonder if the women’s objections were manifestations of the feminism of that era, or with a male culture particular to that place. Or maybe a collision between the 2.
Several decades before 1918 I attended an undergrad program that had begun admitting women about 5 years before I arrived. The freshman class was about 20% female. I don’t remember males getting into shouting matches or banging their fists on the table during arguments, even in dorm room discussions. If someone had I think people of both genders would have thought they were either drunk or a bit nuts. As for crude language, there was plenty of that, but the women mostly used it too. There must have been people who were uncomfortable speaking that dialect, but I think they must have either become inured to it or given up on complaining.
The main differences I was aware of between the men and the women was that men were more likely to be math or hard science majors and talked more openly about career ambitions, and that males playing ultimate frisbee or the like on the quad were a lot more aggressive in their play.
I applied there for school! Had to write 12 essays and didn't even get an interview sadly. Seems like a cool place though for the right type of person!
Yeah, the essays are rough. I'm a few months in to waiting for my results; they flew me out maybe a month and a half ago now, and I will get my answer in the next week.
The in person interview was amazing, one of if not the best week of my life, to be honest. Everyone is insanely bright; I felt like the few days I've spent staying with friends and going to classes @ Chicago and Caltech were incredible, in terms of the intelligence of the people around me, but deep springs was in a league of its own. The classes were very, very good. Usually held in the houses of the professors, and usually the professors made tea or coffee for everyone, although I was told this only started as a trend like a year ago and for most of the history everyone just got tea and coffee themselves in the main building (where food + eating stuff is) and went to class in the many classrooms.
The campus is gorgeous and huge, and I took probably 12h of hikes while I was there.
The other interviewing students were generally great but noticeably not quite as good on average as the attending students.
A large amount, maybe one in four, students and applicants were transfers over the age of 20. Interesting and unexpected to me.
The interview is usually brutal and terrible and really hard, at least I was repeatedly told this, but I didn't experience this at all; everyone seemed great, I got to engage in interesting and hard questions about my values and purposes in life, and I think I did well.
Ask me specific questions if you have them hard to know what to say, it is just such a place.
Fun note: my work boots are still covered in cow milk! I should wash them, I think.
I have been aware of the existence and basic nature of Deep Springs for about as long as I have concerned myself with the existence of colleges and universities at all. It's an interesting idea, I'm glad places like it exist, and I'd have considered applying there if it had been aligned with my academic interests. But since that wasn't the case, I have never had reason to explore beyond the basics.
Why wouldn't it be aligned with your academic interests? When I visited, they had classes on everything from Quantum physics to Catholic thought, and it seems that they choose both instructors and classes based on what is interesting, so you could reasonably propose anything.
Unless you mean applying as a student, in which case I am still curious.
As a student, I always wanted to be a professional rocket scientist. And I now am a professional rocket scientist. That's the sort of thing that requires a specialized, integrated curriculum, not just a few interesting classes at a SLAC, and it really benefits from specialized facilities as well.
Don't worry, I found other ways to waste that year when I got to grad school. Unclear whether they were as fun and rewarding as an academically-wasted year at Deep Springs would have been.
I have created a set of badges/hallmarks for writers, artists, musicians, programmers and all other creatives (I despise the term "content creators", but those) to use to self-declare the amount of AI they've used.
Instead of a binary "no AI was used" vs "Beware: AI slop ahead", I've opted for a linear scale. It's probably not the best approach but I needed something nuanced enough to reflect the situation while simple enough for a consumer to make a snap decision about.
I would very much welcome opinions on whether my boundaries make sense and are well defined (I suspect they're not), whether the concept is clearly communicated and whether any of this would be of interest to other creatives.
On a superficial level, the site is slapdash, copy unproofread, no attention paid to typography, etc etc. Thrown together in a rush and I've not been getting a real amount of sleep recently. I will sort all that stuff out once I'm firmer about the concepts.
Please have a look and let me know what you think.
So what's the incentive for anyone to use something like this? Because I can only imagine two scenarios: either you didn't use AI (or used it in a way that doesn't leave evidence), in which case people would just say they didn't use it, or they blatantly used AI, in which case they're not going to go out of their way to call attention to that. It's kinda like organic food or free-range eggs. The only justification for any of this is if you're trying to get ahead of government regulation, similarly to why rating systems for movies and games exist.
The main incentive is that everyone assumes you're using AI and you want to tell them you're not, or, (because you are) that you're not using as much of it as they think you are.
I am a gamedev (programmer and artist) with projects ranging from ranks 0 to 3. I would not use this for rank 0 projects. Many were made before LLMs were capable of contributing, so it's already implied. Additionally, all of my art projects are kept strictly rank 0, this is the assumption and expectation of those who view them, and I feel that marking it explicitly would weaken that assumption especially if I missed some and forgot to mark them.
I most definitely wouldn't use it for rank 3 projects, such as the one time that I asked AI to write unit tests and used those (large project, single usage), or the time that I asked AI to solve a problem and it completely bungled it but I managed to salvage a few bits for a final result that I could have done myself in less time. For both those projects, the rank 3 rating is correct, AI-generated artifacts were incorporated, but either not included in the end product (unit tests), or make up less than 0.1% of the lines of code. So I feel rank 3 would give people an overly pessimistic impression, and would prefer to leave it out.
One project would I think count as rank 2. I followed a human-written tutorial for learning Vulkan, in most cases copying the lines of code straight out of the instructions. At the end it didn't work, so I pasted the whole thing and Claude pointed out the bug. I fixed that and learned not to do that again. This project was just for fun, but if it hadn't been, would I dare publish it with a mark that it's 2 out of 6 on AI usage? No I would not; 2 of 6 sounds like a lot and I don't want to set myself up for trouble.
I don't think I have any rank 1 projects. I keep track of things too well for that. They start at 0 and, for code projects, often quickly progress to 2 or 3 if I see a good way for the AI to improve the quality. I have mixed feelings about this, whether to take longer to deliver a worse result just so I can say AI played no part. On the one hard you could argue it's like writing in higher level languages instead of assembly, and that we should use the tools available. On the other hand, good luck explaining that to gamers. So mostly I just hope no one asks.
Edit: Actually I do have one rank 1 or possibly 2 art project. I used an image generator trying to get some inspiration, but everything it made sucked and what I ended up drawing was basically the same as what I'd had in my head from the start. I think the nice backgrounds on those images did motivate me to make the background slightly nicer, though in an entirely different way.
> all of my art projects are kept strictly rank 0, this is the assumption and expectation of those who view them,
I am envisioning a world where the default assumption is no longer that humans do work, because "why would anyone if they don't have to". And I don't think that world is too far off. If you thought that people thought that you used AI when you hadn't, would that change your instinct about using these marks?
> and I feel that marking it explicitly would weaken that assumption
I can sort of understand the reasoning here but not really. Is it in the sense that, the badge has reminded the audience that AI exists and as a result they associate you with it? Is the badge "sullying" the wholesome work? Or is it just the thing you said about people assuming the worst for the ones you forgot to mark?
> I used an image generator trying to get some inspiration, but everything it made sucked and what I ended up drawing was basically the same as what I'd had in my head from the start.
This has been my experience multiple times. It feels really galling to have to give the AI credit when all it did was produce rubbish and spur you to do things yourself. I'm tempted to call it just a form of "thinking things through to yourself" - but I suspect that's cheating.
Thanks for your rundown. I am becoming aware that the psychology of choosing a mark isn't doing what I'd prefer.
I intended HALmark 1 to be the "human default", with HALmark 0 reserved for those who make a specific commitment. But once 0 exists, it makes 1 look like you compromised. And that's true of all the others.
I have definitely caught myself trying to worm out of having to admit something is HALmark 2. See my post below about AI images for writing inspiration for one example.
One thing I really want to avoid is paralysing you: "I naturally feel like I should do X now - but wait, I can't do that, that might make me gain a rank." Cue mental gridlock and wheel spinning rather than relaxing, having ideas, and making progress.
Someone suggested I put a quiz on the website - there's no public definitions, you answer a bunch of questions and the right mark is recommended for you. This might help. I'm not sure.
I also keep coming back to the thought that for anything complex, my linear scale isn't adequate and you really want to give more nuanced information about what was and was not AI, because some uses are more sympathetic than others (either to you personally or your audience).
If people mentioned that they thought it might be AI, I'd reply to explain the situation. If I were popular enough that the number of people saying this became infeasible to personally reply to, I'd put the info in the FAQ. With, as you say, more nuanced information for the projects where AI was involved.
As for weakening assumptions, you know what happens when you tell kids "Don't stuff beans up your nose"? Right. So there's no advantage for me for specifically reminding people that it wasn't made by AI. It helps that the actual image text doesn't include that word, but if they looked up the ranks, that would do it.
I'd very much appreciate any advice you've got about how to approach this ethically.
My reaction to seeing a small stamp saying MADE BY HUMAN HANDS on someone's work - and then following the link to find a list of the other ranks - would be, "huh, looks like there's a movement where people declare AI usage. That's cool/obvious/stupid/I could do it better."
It wouldn't occur to me that someone would read, MADE BY HUMAN HANDS, and think, "lol that means it obviously isn't." But now I say that out loud, of course some people will think like that. But what can you do, those same people will probably accuse you of AI use the moment someone else brings up the topic anyway.
> I'd very much appreciate any advice you've got about how to approach this ethically.
I often feel I'm talking past everyone else on this. I always hear other people talk about it in political/economic terms - who's going to be losing their jobs and whether that's okay if new, different kinds of jobs open up as a result - or consumer terms - will the menu of content that I can consume become richer or poorer.
I look at it from what you might call a virtue ethics perspective: the act of producing, crafting and creating things makes us men. Consuming without creating makes us pigs. Even if AI was guaranteed to create high quality work that displays beauty and says profound things while keeping everyone in jobs or removing the need for them to work at all - something fundamental is still being lost.
>Even if AI was guaranteed to create high quality work that displays beauty and says profound things while keeping everyone in jobs or removing the need for them to work at all - something fundamental is still being lost.
Ok, you do you. I'll do me. I _do_ look at it from the point of view of
>consumer terms - will the menu of content that I can consume become richer or poorer
( provided that hallucinations are minimal in works that I request which are supposed to be accurate! )
I would be delighted to e.g. be able to request, say, a tutorial on the 5 most important instabilities in tokamaks, done in the style of kurzgesagt.
In a way, yes. We are lesser in many ways now we don't know the meaning of real work. Obviously it was worth the trade for the food security we can now take for granted. (But the fact is that we *take it for granted*. There's no respect. A world has been lost and we no longer understand what it is we should have respect for.)
I'm wondering if we should be thinking about dividing the world up into "hard" and "soft". Hard tasks are tied to important outcomes - engineering, diagnosing and curing disease, warfare - and their destiny is to be optimised and automated to the nth degree.
There is no justification for letting a doctor make a cancer diagnosis when an AI can do it quicker and more accurately and the difference is millions of lives. But shouldn't this be taken to mean, eventually, that cancer diagnosis is not an acceptable human occupation, and no human should take pride in or hold status for being good at it?
Soft, "human" tasks result in things that really don't matter - pretty pictures, fun games, intricate sculptures, etc. The act of creating these is as important as the results you get at the end, and trying to optimise away all human involvement is a crime against humanity.
But I'm not happy with this because it means the only things humans should take pride in are things that fundamentally don't matter, and that's not how pride works or should work.
It was vaguely about how if it's widespread to assume AI usage, it's probably also not as stigmatized. But I decided the specifics included more personal information than I was comfortable with.
Also, a friend of mine does some rank 3 stuff and publicly admits to it. For unrelated reasons, he decided to delete a release in a way that was very inconvenient to a lot of people. Of course people jumped to the conclusion that it was because of AI and everything he does now is pure AI slop, when in actuality, I know those mistakes came from his own two hands.
You could call 2 Computer Aided Creative Writing (CACW) in the spirit of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM). Humans don’t draw out the traces of integrated circuits by hand after all.
I don't quite get the border between 1 and 2. If I use AI for research, when do I step over the line? Does asking an LLM "what did a regular day in a sheriff's office in a small Wyoming county in the 80's look like" count as 1 and "what jobs in a small Wyoming county in the 80's would allow a serial killer to hide in plain sight" count as 2?
I have no idea. I can clearly see that the extremes belong in different categories, but don't know where to draw a clear line down the middle.
I didn't want to punish *any tangential AI use at all* because HALmark 1 is clearly higher status and you don't always know you're going to make the thing you thought you were before you start.
But at the other end, letting AI do a chunk of your thinking for you is clearly something that should show up in the rankings.
I'm leaning towards leniency right now purely because AI "ideas" are currently so generic and mediocre. But that's clearly not future proof.
I think using AI as a research assistant to find original source material isn’t much different than being able to write a good Google search query. Human authors do sometimes use other human research assistants. See undergrads doing the grunt work for the prof whose name goes on the final paper.
It beats the hell out of spending months in library stacks all by your lonesome self.
And it’s good to use it as an editor to find dopey misspellings and trivial grammatical errors like ending a sentence with a preposition; changing “Where y’all from?” to “Where y’all from, bitch?” for example. ;)
The biggest problem is in the whole "self-declare" bit. I view, uh... other... sites... that have the AI label, and yet there's tons of clearly, purely AI stuff that isn't marked as such, because the people producing the worst slop are the people who will never add the tag.
(...also are you really going to put it at the very end, in the credits? What's the point at that point?)
The badges currently have a "self-reported" label in red, which can be swapped out for a more "secure" label in amber or green... just as soon as someone thinks of a better solution.
Off the cuff I have: another AI tries to evaluate you, which becomes an arms race, or, we/our AIs have to watch you while you make it. Which is an Orwellian nightmare that also runs completely counter to how creativity works. I can't make progress on those fronts as easily as I can move forward with the self-reported ones, so that's what I'm doing at the moment.
In terms of people not self-declaring, I think it's the other way around. Coffee companies don't loudly announce they're Pro Slavery, they just have to stay quiet while other companies get to shout about being Fair Trade.
I think initially people would take pride in announcing their lower ranks, especially if they thought people might assume differently.
In cases like game development there's a lot of consumer sympathy with the fact that no lone dev can do all the work, nor do we like it when larger companies produce things by committee instead. That guy might be glad of the chance to show a HALmark 3 or 4 to stop people assuming a 4 or 5.
Eventually any media not having a tag leads to the assumption of HALmark 5 or 6, which is what will happen anyway. I hope the HALmarks let us add nuance on the way.
Can't stop people lying, can only punish them for doing so.
>In cases like game development there's a lot of consumer sympathy with the fact that no lone dev can do all the work,
I'd like to see a source for that, because I find it highly unlikely from what I've seen. Gamers despise AI involvement, especially undisclosed, and lone devs have been doing all the work ever since developing games was a thing. Four of the top 5 best-selling PC games of all time started out as one-man projects:
And all that is ignoring the very real side effects of the AI business on the gaming hobby, i.e. massively increasing hardware prices in RAM and storage.
Yeah, okay, using gamers anywhere near the term "consumer sympathy" is asking for objection.
But there is at least a widespread understanding that a game is a huge and involved complex project - quantitatively different than writing, programming, artwork, music, etc on their own. And even gamers know it's unrealistic to demand parity between an indie dev and an AAA studio. If AI looks like it can change that disparity, there will be people in the crowd who see AI use as a valid compromise.
> Gamers despise AI involvement, especially undisclosed
>And even gamers know it's unrealistic to demand parity between an indie dev and an AAA studio.
Nobody has ever expected or demanded that. The entire reason why indie games are popular is that they make up for small budgets with creativity.
AAA and indies complement each other. Big budget games have to play it safe with gameplay but can push technological/scale boundaries, while small devs have to play it safe with their budget but can experiment with art styles and especially gameplay. In my earlier comment, I highlighted that indies are among the all time best selling PC games; that is not a coincidence. That is the first mover bonus, breaking new ground in gameplay and being rewarded for it financially, that only indies fully enjoy.
>If AI looks like it can change that disparity, there will be people in the crowd who see AI use as a valid compromise.
These people will be wrong, I believe. AI assets not only solve a problem indies don't have. They are possibly even to the scene's long-term detriment, because it discourages the experimentation that is among their competitive advantages. Nobody needs indies that try to encroach on AAA turf.
>That's... why I'm here.
I get that, and I don't want to disparage your project in particular. I'm all for flagging AI content. I just wanted to object, as you said, to the notion that gamers are broadly in favor of AI in gaming.
Here's an example I have no idea what to do with: let's say I'm writing a story. I have a soul and would no more let an AI write for me than let it fuck my wife.
But what if I use the AI to generate images of my characters and world and notable scenes and setpieces. I never show them to anyone, I just use them to get myself excited about the project and motivate me to carry on.
And, is there a difference between just looking at the pics and thinking, "yeah, this is so cool, let's get on and write it," and looking at the pics and thinking, "actually, that little detail in the background gives me an idea for how she gets out of the cage."
One of them is "just" motivation, the other is actual inspiration. (And I can't do just one - I can't choose *not* to have an idea if I see one.) Neither of them are writing. But I am very definitely "using AI".
Boy you're right, it's hard to paint hard, bright lines along a spectrum, but I think the AI use as you describe it in this comment falls under "research?" I don't have a problem with writers using AI to generate a map of the space base their story is set in to keep better track of the physical mechanics. I don't think that's meaningfully different from basing your space base on your actual high school (mine looked like a Martian prison colony).
They're the same level. If you need visual representations to motivate you to write, and you use AI to create the visual representations, then you're already using it to write.
Meanwhile I'm over here with my first-grade-level handdrawn black-and-white bubblestick figures, going "I kind of wish I'd learned to draw, it would really help the writing process."
I would merge level 0 and level 1. Trying to split "Entirely human made" into two categories feels like a bit too much.
The last 2 images seem a bit confusing to me. Prior to to that, the robot is getting bigger and more prominent. But then the human becomes more prominent for Level 5. A human sitting down, writing on paper, doesn't invoke "AI generated" to me.
Surely the last image should just be the robot without the human?
There's definitely "work" done by a prompt engineer, even if a real craftsman would scoff at it. So level 5 is distinct from level 6 in that it's a human giving instructions to an AI.
An icon of a human giving instructions to a robot looks busier and more confusing. Also, the robot itself was always just a metaphor for the microchip, not the other way around.
I get that it's a pattern break. But I couldn't show the earlier stages easily with a microchip or the later stages with a robot.
Also, these images are intended to be seen in isolation, not as part of a set. If you pick up a product that has the little man writing on it (for now accompanied by the words MADE BY AI AT HUMAN DIRECTION) then I hope the meaning will come through.
Suggestion: Start using a very basic version system (v1, v2, ...) for the marks, the way e.g. the GPL does. That way, if you ever significantly update the images (or even the content) of the marks, you don't have to worry about backwards incompatibility/confusion, visual or otherwise. Not a big concern before anyone has actually started using them, but wanted to throw it out there
My thinking on 0 and 1 was this: it's unfair and impractical to penalise people just for living in a world with AI. If I habitually use AI for asking questions, and one of those questions is, "I'm trying to draw a hippo, but what does a hippo actually look like?" then my reference image is potentially going to be AI-generated*. Am I now never again allowed to say I drew something entirely by myself?
* actually I don't even need to be using AI voluntarily, image searches return AI generated results by themselves.
And what if it happens the other way around - I haven't even gone looking for reference images yet, I was having an unrelated chat with an AI when I got the idea for a really great picture. Do I owe the AI for that picture now?
At the same time, if I'm someone who has sworn off AI use, and lived a tougher life because of it, or if in this one case it's a "wholesome" project and I'm adamant that there be explicitly no AI influence on it, and I've closed all my chats and conscientiously taken steps to ensure that's the case - then I've clearly gone a step further than someone who hasn't.
(And if you can't understand why that's a thing I might want to do, or why it's merit-worthy, then can you even understand why humans might want these marks at all?)
But if having gone this extra mile I found I was lumped in with all the casuals who look at AI-generated hippos and call it a day, I would probably feel miffed.
Hence Rank 1, where normal people start counting, is a common sense "a human did this," and there's a secret Rank 0 to catch the extra case.
Consider paintings. HALmark1 could be generating a HALmark6 image, hanging it on the wall in front of you, and painting what you see with, say, oil on canvas. Or maybe carving a sculpture. I think it would fail the purpose of this label if it did not keep these distinct from doing the same WITHOUT such a reference.
Definitely. Thanks for the use case, examples like this are really helpful.
I think there's no difference between tracing an image and copy/pasting text, and if someone copy/pasted text over into LibreOffice and called it done, that's a clear HALmark 5 (or 6, if they didn't even write a proper prompt).
Where skill is involved in the act of copying, it gets a bit woollier. Am I rewarding the technical human skill of painting/sculpting, or penalising the lack of skill in composition, form, narrative, etc?
This is where a single numerical rank is probably not enough, but I worried that anything more complex would not be picked up as easily.
I feel like that would be a rank 2. I know rank 1 lists reference images, but something akin to paint by numbers on an Ai image seems much stronger than getting some Inspo. Still, I think you might be right that the lvl 0 vs 1 distinction is relevant.
If it were instead a photograph, or a renaissance painting, or even a life art model, would the skill being demonstrated, the ability to faithfully translate what you see onto canvas be any less diminished?
From the description, being functionally the same, but with special care taken to exclude anything that could be considered AI is what distinguishes HALmark0 from HALmark1.
Didn't even think about that, lol. In the "proper" version those examples would be glossy shots of a variety of real work using the marks. But no such work exists right now so you get a bunch of monotonous squares.
I also like the HALmarks wordplay and the fact that the marks contain the required attribution.
Well done :)
(It's worth providing an example attribution for a text-only case, as well.)
Maybe it makes sense to remove one rank or so (perhaps merging 0 and 1?), just to have fewer options to read up on.
Also I think the phrasing sometimes strongly implies the AI as the generator and the human as the transformer (heh) of stuff, but this needn't be the case. For instance, I could draw a bunch of images, then tell an AI to make a movie out of them.
E.g. Rank 4: "The AI did a significant share of the work, with the human spending more time on editing... "
So more neutral language regarding the roles would make sense. I'd have to think some more about concrete suggestions.
Lastly, I don't feel like it makes a big difference whether the human could've made stuff at this level themselves or not. If a professional painter uses AI to paint, will people really value it differently than if a random person produced the same artwork? I'm not so sure, but maybe that's just me.
Thanks! I was wondering if anyone would actually get the pun in there.
I've explained my thinking on ranks 0 and 1 to Tyler upthread.
> For instance, I could draw a bunch of images, then tell an AI to make a movie out of them.
These kind of examples are exactly what I was hoping to hear, thanks. It does open the discussion up a lot more.
My instinctive response is that's a "compound" work - they're human-generated images, but it's an AI-generated video. Both statements are true. If you want to look at it that way, so is the fact than an animator has been cheated out of a job, but an illustrator hasn't.
Exactly what a "compound" work is, or how you should be allowed to define it, isn't something I've nailed down yet. But I think it's a pretty important concept.
> Lastly, I don't feel like it makes a big difference whether the human could've made stuff at this level themselves or not.
I think it makes all the difference in the world. It's the difference between "human, with a bit of laziness," and "superhuman". Alternatively it's the difference between a skilled, disciplined creative person and a nerk who's "faking it".
I can see a discerning consumer want to reward either of those cases.
(The question of why a consumer would care is the unacknowledged other half of the equation. I think, "someone has been cheated out of a job" is one reason, which is mundane and clear even to people with no aesthetic sensibilities.
But entirely separate from that, a general desire that the world contains authentic skilled creative humans also plays a big part - at least for me it does.)
The big trap, which I don't know how to avoid, is how easy it is to tell yourself, "well, I *could* have done that if I wanted," and blur the line between 3 and 4.
A great painter can say, "I know I can draw cats, I've done loads of times before, but I don't like doing them and I've got a lot on so the AI can help me with this one," and maybe that's fair enough. He gets a Rank 3.
But if ten years down the line he's never touched a cat again, and the evidence that he can paint them is yellowing and peeling in his loft, but he's now famous for his beautiful cat drawings - clearly here there's something wrong. And I don't think it takes ten years for skills to atrophy, I'm not sure it even takes ten days.
Has AI writing improved over the last couple of years? I tried it out when chatGPT was released and the writing was profoundly boring without being able to write more than a couple paragraphs. How much better is it now? My assumption is that it’s surely become more capable of writing longer prompts but I don’t know how you could measure it’s creativity.
It still doesn't write well, but it writes a lot better than before. I find it very useful provided you (1) prompt it in such a way as to avoid its worst excesses (bad metaphor, unnecessarily-complex sentences, useless words) and (2) edit thoroughly.
I speak only of non-fiction summarization here; I frankly wouldn't trust it with much else.
It is much better than before, though it’s still generally (though not always) easy to tell what’s AI. To explain how I feel about it with analogy, reading ChatGPTese in 2020 literally felt like eating cardboard. It was ungodly bland. Now it feels like eating leftovers. Still not as good as it can get and often bland, but the best can genuinely be more enjoyable than some authentic writing.
I don't know why it is trained to be verbose. I sometimes use it to recommend first messages on dating sites, and it is like a huge wall of text and I have to keep reminding it that it must be two short sentences max. No one has that kind of attention span these days.
Note if you do this, you are filtering for only girls who do not easily recognize AI-generated text. I wouldn't recommend it. (Source: Am girl, might figure it out, would snub you over it.)
Even when it is short? The most obvious giveaway of AI is verbosity. For example I sent this to a lady wearing a triskelion medallion (BDSM symbolism):
"Have you won that medal at the sub Olympics? In which discipline would you compete if I would be the referee? :)"
It's better at some things, and the same at other things (zero real improvement). The biggest improvement is indeed your guess. It can right longer prompts, especially when you put "does not forget what it's doing or get confused" into the mix. It has more or less perfect grammar.
It's basically as bad at style as it's always been. It has a few things it identifies as hard-hitting great prose, and it uses these all the time, breathlessly, in a really exhausting way. Over longer periods of text, it plots with zero breathing room; this is happening, now that is happening, now this is happening, all big plot point things.
You can mitigate some of this with really specific prompting, but it's basically going to top out at "Inexperienced, relatively bright highschool kid trying out every writing thing he's ever heard of at once, and also he hasn't heard of that much stuff".
It's interesting talking about it in public, because it's sort of the same as a lot of AI use; everyone thinks it's amazing until they use it for one of their specialties, where they can actually tell if it's doing a good job, and then they mostly find it lacking. But since most people aren't writers, you get like 10,000 engineer types saying "no it can do anything, you just have to prompt it right", where actually prompting it differently is just using different color febreeze cans to cover up the shit smell.
The difference with writing and it coding is that with the latter, it either gets me the right answer or it doesn't. With writing, it's generally much less clearcut what exactly it is we're looking for.
I think that's why AI is still bad at writing. It's not training on what is good taste.
That, and I think the AI is basically looking at things where people say "this is good writing, this is the quote to pay attention to". And it's the wordiest part of the book, the place the author was really stretching out after chapters and chapters of earning it. And to some extent I think that's what it sees all writing as, those super-complex overwritten bits that would be exhausting if the entire book was made of them.
I think if you had never seen AI writing as it stands today and saw one individual paragraph, it wouldn't pop out as absolutely bad. But if you have it write much more than that, the fatigue of reading it sets in pretty quickly.
The Hyperstition AI contest sounds like a scam. There are a bunch of red flags.
1. The judges are all peudonymous. In literary contests, the judges' real identities are usually known. If the judges can't be trusted to be honest and unbiased when their real identities are known, then they shouldn't be trusted to be judges.
2. There are applications to be a contestant. This is not just registration. A fair contest would be open to the public. It's reasonable that they want to limit their compute grant budget; the fair way to do this is to grant a fixed amount of compute to the first N registrants.
3. They are not required to grant a prize to anyone. They have the right not to finish submissions which they find unpleasant. It is easy to find a submission unpleasant if finishing it costs $10,000.
4. There is theoretically a $10,000 prize, but there is no legal entity listed, no terms and conditions, and no explanation about how the prize money is disbursed.
The real motivation behind the contest seems to be to crowdsource development of an LLM pipeline that can generate convincing short fiction, to people who are potentially capable of developing such a pipeline but who are too naive to see that they are being used, in exchange for a small amount of compute, possibly less than the $100 recommended, possibly requiring those contestants to spend money out of their own pockets. Hyperstition AI will then appropriate that LLM pipeline for their book generation business (https://www.hyperstitionai.com/generate).
I think that this is what is happening, and I think that passing this off as a contest without being forthcoming about the motivation is dishonest and exploitative.
Edit: After reading a reply, my comment was probably an overreaction. On reflection it's not really more exploitative than other contests, and could just be amateur instead of underhanded.
The contest runners are pseudonymous, but they're pseuds that have been around this part of the internet for a pretty long time and I would consider them to be fairly trustworthy. (Also, with that much online presence, it can't be that difficult to track them down and sue them if they refuse to pay.)
It does sound plausible that they'll use the result to improve their business, but I wouldn't consider that a *scam.* Other companies have run similar contests, e.g., Netflix ran a contest for improving their recommendation algorithm. They should be upfront about this goal but it's not inherently wrong.
It does say that they have the right to not finish any entries, but I don't see where it says they reserve the right to not give a prize at all.
I agree that with $10,000 on the line, they really need to put the terms and conditions in writing before you sign up. That's too much money to trust to a handshake.
Yeah, on reflection I think you're right that it's not more exploitative than the Netflix contest. I think it's more the lack of being upfront about what I think their intent is, that made it feel underhanded to me. The Netflix prize made it clear in the official rules that what you were really winning was the right to sell Netflix a non-exclusive license to your model. The lack of clarity here sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
It's also possible that they're not intentionally being underhanded, or even that they have no intention of using the submitted pipeline at all, and that they just didn't put enough thought into the contest rules.
The not giving a prize at all I see as a corollary; if they reserve the right to disqualify any entries, then they reserve the right to disqualify all entries. Again, this could just be a policy that was not really thought out. (Or it could be that I'm misinterpreting it, for example if they don't disqualify an entry that they don't finish).
I think they will pay out the 10k price because it's so cheap but otherwise I agree that it seems dishonest and exploitative. Though I would somewhat trust Gwern random AI safety projects just have a very high rate of devolving into making things worse.
Question about the unslop contest. One of the rules is no post-generation editing. However, you are allowed to do "hundreds of generations" before settling on a story to submit. Doesn't doing multiple generations allow the user to do the equivalent of editing? For instance, they could ask the AI to make the paragraphs describing a dramatic event in the story more exciting by reducing the amount of description of the boring stuff like setting, substituting powerful action verbs for dull action word + adverb combos, etc.
Is it that when the rules say you can do multiple generations they mean that once you generate an actual story you cannot add to the prompt, but only run the same prompt hundreds of times?
I did not see a way to contact the people running the contest to ask this question.
I am pre-registering that they probably don't care about the type of editing you are talking about. If I'm guessing correctly, they are aiming at showing people "what's the best AI can currently do" or something similar. And the thing about that is that AI can only do so well right now.
You can say, hey, rewrite this paragraph to be BETTER and phrase it however you want, but it's only going to be, you know, so much better. Despite the general twitter take that there's magic prompts that really do make AI a pulitzer-level author, what's happening at this level of editing is more like smashing a re-roll button than it is actual refining.
I could be wrong on that, but even if I am and AI is much better than that, stuff like "this is bad make it better", however phrased, would still be under the umbrella of "the best AI can currently do". I doubt they'd care much unless it got down to the actual level of human editing involvement on a word-by-word level, so to speak.
Seems like there's a pretty big gray zone where something could be thought of as just adding to the prompt or as editing on a word by word level. So, for instance, I could tell the AI that a strong verb is better than a weak one + adverb: "sprinted" is better than "ran fast." And then I could tell it 50 places where it uses weak verb + adverb -- which sentence numbers in which paragraphs have that usage -- and then ask it to in each case substitute a strong verb .And actually In many such cases there would be only one strong verb that's the obvious choice, so I'd really be editing word by word.
But we're invited to make "hundreds of generations." Presumably contestants will be changing the prompt between generations. What kinds of changes are legit? It is not spelled out.
The contest says you have to submit the entire prompt alongside the story, so changes are changes to the initial prompt. You can tell it to write a story about a dragon a hundred times, and pick your favorite, or you can read through the story and try to create an initial prompt that makes a better one.
So, "Write a dragon." Eh, too serious. "Write a goofy dragon." No, not that goofy. "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon." Okay, the dragon's good, but the story's boring. "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing something cool." Ooh, skateboarding! It should do tricks! "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing skateboard tricks." Good stuff, but the background is a void. "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing skateboard tricks on Mount Sinai." Ugh, why is Moses there? "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing atheist-friendly skateboard tricks on Mount Sinai." And so on.
Concerned about the unslop contest accelerating capabilities, like every other benchmark has? Take 5 minutes and prompt Claude or ChatGPT to write up an excellent application to the hyperstition contest. It's free and fun and supposedly they like it.
I had good luck with
Hi! I want to enter a creative contest on AI fiction writing. Can you help me fill out this form? Do a great job using your own creative juices and don't ask follow up questions.
"I think I should say, before I start this episode, where I am on the Epstein story. If you forced me to give you my best guess, I think this guy had a lot of powerful friends, and that he was a predator and a pedophile, and those sides of his life were mostly separate."
"I think the one happening right now is Jeffrey Epstein. I have found it disorienting how much it tracks the vibe of QAnon. Not every claim of QAnon. It’s not: John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive somewhere. But you are dealing with a very powerful person with an incredibly powerful and broad elite network and child sex trafficking at the center of it."
"Again, I don’t believe in QAnon, but it is eerie how QAnon was sort of a mirror world version of Jeffrey Epstein."
If Klein changed his mind because of new evidence, you'd think he'd want to share it with his readers, but he does not do so. When your low-IQ cousin does that, it's possible he's just doing what stupid people do: see an unsupported claim on Facebook, believe it, repeat it. People like Klein know how to support their arguments with evidence; when they fail to do so, it’s because they know they can’t.
On the other end of the brainrot spectrum, Hollywood person James Woods, the executive producer of Oppenheimer, has embraced the fusion of Bible thumpery and white nationalism:
You might have thought that the flow of Hollywood and tech people into the Right would make it smarter, or at least different. With this guy, like with Elon Musk, that hasn’t happened, they’re just mainlining the same braindead Facebook memes that appeal to uneducated 50-year-old truck drivers. (It should go without saying that the meme’s claims are false, white women are substantially less likely than non-whites to get abortions. White nationalist fusionism combines white nationalism with Bible thumpery, with any conflicts resolved in favor of the latter, the resolution often consisting of straight-up lying.)
This seems unfair/uneducated about the topic. Klein releases a limited number of podcasts each month and they are on specific topics, usually with specific domain-expert guests, researched,fact-checked, and pre-written. It's not a stream-of-consciousness ramble full of diversion, like many podcasts.
Meaning, I'm not surprised that he doesn't take time to go into a diversion about what evidence changed his view on Epstein during a show where that isn't the topic of the show, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's in the process of researching/writing up a new show on Epstein that will come out in a few weeks.
I've never listened to the show, but I thought it *was* the more stream-of-consciousness, lot-of-diversions thing which is where I was saying you *would* expect someone to explain their thinking.
I know 'but did you consider both sides are bad?' is an easy applause line around here, but when someone gives a specific causal logic in their comment, it's polite to at least acknowledge it.
I read this quite differently. Ezra believes Jeffrey Epstein was a disreputable person who was not in fact the center of a cabal of elite pedophiles, but lots of people are credulously motivated to believe any story where he is the center of a cabal of elite pedophiles. Ezra also believes that QAnon is a disreputable person who is not in fact possessed of privileged information about a cabal of elite pedophiles, but lots of people are credulously motivated to believe any story where he can tell them about a cabal of elite pedophiles He is not "singing a different tune", he is singing the same tune in a different chord and noting the harmony.
Well the specific claim was that his powerful friends had nothing to do with his trafficking, which the last tranche of files revealed to be far less true than Ezra hoped(?). Then he seems to have become far more accepting of this reality after the files dropped. It's just weird, really. Why is he so reluctant to admit that some powerful people are probably sex traffickers? Why can't he admit that he was a bit too light on his coverage? If you really examine those questions, it reveals a lot about his psychology and the psychology of liberals.
>Why is he so reluctant to admit that some powerful people are probably sex traffickers?
There's no actual evidence for that claim.
This tells us a lot about the psychology of conservatives. This is a golden opportunity for them to take the side of reason and evidence and they could even defend Trump while doing it. They won't because their self-esteem is bound up in thinking people more successful than them are pedophiles.
What is your standard of evidence? Would you like 3 angles of video footage, witness testimony, and an admission of guilt? Should we get DNA samples from 20 years in the past? Okay.
Other than Epstein, what powerful people is there evidence that convinces you to think they're sex traffickers? I mean, the Epstein stuff re-enforces the knowledge that lots of rich and powerful people sleep with prostitutes and probably don't know or care exactly how consensual their choice of employment is or what age they are. And a lot of #metoo stuff demonstrates that many powerful, rich, famous people are sexual predators in at least the "sleep with me or you're fired" or "sleep with me or you'll never work in this town again" sense. But neither of those are sex trafficking.
Well, no, actually shipping (sometimes underaged) prostitutes from different parts of the world and, confirmed by the files, texting about sending them to each other as gifts, is indeed sex trafficking by the legal definition.
In the first quote, he says explicitly that he is making his "best guess" , "if you forced me".
Then goes on to say they (the powerful network and the predation) were "mostly separate".
A guess is not a claim. And mostly separate is not the same as 100% separate.
In the second quote he's merely noting a resonance between the stories surrounding both phenomenon. He's talking about the vibes...he explicitly says "it tracks the vibe.."
Why are we comparing a guess and a comment about vibes?
I think it's pretty clear that Epstein trafficked girls to some friends, but not all. And there isn't yet clear evidence for every individual case. Prince Andrew, pretty clearly implicated. The princess of Norway... I'd guess not, I dunno?
Also why would this reveal something about the psychology of liberals??
"Also why would this reveal something about the psychology of liberals??"
1. Reluctance to question power as it would undermine the legitimacy of their liberal democratic system, to question the wealthy and powerful would suggest that power and wealth is in some sense illegitimate, and we can't have that.
2. Unreasonably high conflict-avoidance, going out of their way to avoid breaking norms or instigating fights even to their detriment, general light-footed attitude towards any conversation, general apathy towards addressing real problems.
Am I wrong here? Anyway, I get what you're trying to say, but Ezra Klein is not the messenger for that, the context of his character makes a statement like that very different to saying the equivalent "Some people are almost certainly pedophiles or sex traffickers, they work in places like the UN, royal families, etc. and here are some of their names." Evidence for some of that was available even before the latest tranche. But he didn't say that or something like that, because he's a bit of a coward, he constantly avoids difficult subjects (see his sam harris debate), and he's a liberal through and through, he must defend power and tiptoe around truth.
America is an example of the failures of liberal democracy, coming from a leftist. They are have produced people like Ezra Klein who have in their small part collectively enabled decades of corruption and stagnation to go unchecked.
Its a very broad generalization, to say “liberals” have a certain characteristic. Chatgpt tells me in the US that would be about 80 million people. It's also a pretty diverse group, racially, religiously, genderwise, in education level (although decreasingly for this one). I don't find much value in trying to collectively describe such a large group.
On “Reluctance to question power”.
In recent memory… did Ezra not very publically call for Joe Biden to step down as Democratic candidate in a time when no democratic member of Congress had done so. Joe Biden being arguably the most powerful man in the world at that moment.
Hasn't Ezra consistently (for like a decade) called for amending the filibuster? Is that not a very specific and practical way of questioning power(whether you agree with it or not)?
In general, aren't all efforts to tax the billionaires and regulate huge monopolies coming from the liberal side of society. Whether or not we agree with those methods, are they not questioning power?
On “high conflict avoidance”
Liberals in general I think we can attribute to a large extent (not exclusively ) the “woke era”, cancellation culture, black lives matter protests, etc.
Those are all high conflict topics, no (whether we agree with them or not)?
On “general apathy towards addressing real problems”
Have you read Ezra's latest book Abundance?
It's an extremely pragmatic attempt to start a new movement towards a society that builds on a large scale to solve it's problems.
It's basically the opposite of apathy, it's an attempt at pragmatism.
Ezra pretty constantly discusses the lefts theory of winning/power. If I recall correctly advocating for Democrats embracing more Joe Manchin-like characters that might be distasteful (to progressives) in one sense, like pro-oil or pro-life, but who have a chance of winning swing states and joining a broader Democratic coalition.
On “ some members of [Royal families] are almost certainly pedophiles or sex traffickers”
I guess you're talking about Andrew?
I’m not 100% up to date on all the Epstein releases. But Im pretty sure Andrew was accused of sexually abusing a trafficked 17 year old. I'm not sure if theres allegations or evidence that he was aware of her age or that she was trafficked.
I'm not defending his horrible terrible actions, I'm just saying, I think hes being accused of being an abuser/mega creep/ lier/ abuser of public trust… but not specifically pedophilia or sex trafficking. I might be wrong on this.
But yes I agree with you, there's probably a base rate of pedophilia, like 1% (for example) , and the rich and powerful it's probably higher, because 1. they are powerful so can get away with shit and feel untouchable 2. I think non-empathic people rise to power and riches easier.
Again, not defending Andrew or Epstein and their horrible actions, but I dont find very general, vibes-based broad accusations to be helpful.
So I'm not shitting on you here, but this is a limitation with "chatgpt research". We already have established definitions for terms like "liberal" in political science, there are core tenets which they all must believe in order to be considered liberals and core psychological traits which lead them to those beliefs, and so in this context it is reasonable to make fuzzy generalisations about the entire group. Self-identified liberals, which may or may not be 80 million Americans I don't know, those are not entirely who I am talking about, there's probably 10s of millions of people in that group who either don't qualify, misrepresent their beliefs, are apolitical but vote democrat because their partner told them to, etc.
Was calling for biden to step down "questioning power"? He was simply making what he felt was the best calculation to allow liberals to win even more power. Same with the fillibuster.
My understanding is those social justice issues you speak of were fairly controversial, with some liberals or liberal-adjacents believing things like black lives matter were harming election chances and demanding their democratic leaders to change course. In any case, there is still a lot of conflict avoidance in other areas, like failing to help Ukraine defeat Russia, which has been a problem with 2 different democratic administrations now.
Abundance is a fine proposal I guess, but even the people who agree with it have largely criticised it for being just okay and not bold enough. Some of those people include fellow liberals. Ezra's "pragmatism" is an example of conflict-avoidance. He should have been advocating for Mamdanis, not Manchins.
"I'm not sure if theres allegations or evidence that he was aware of her age or that she was trafficked."
Look, this comes down to different standards of evidence. For some people, nothing will ever be enough. Revealing private statements, witness testimony, pictures of him with underaged girls, etc... it's not enough for you, and that's okay for you, but not for me.
1. Trump's new terms for peace with Iran largely match Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — which Iran seemed to be following (to the letter, but possibly not the spirit) until Trump scrapped them in 2017 as being inadequate. But Trumpers claim he'll do a better job of enforcing them (but instead of scrapping them, why didn't he do a better job of enforcing them when he was Prez the first time around?). I've seen lots of pushback on the claim that JCPOA was the same as Trump's demands, because it didn't address ballistic missiles and sponsoring terrorist groups, but there were already sanctions in place for those under Obama.
2. As for Iran's missiles, two were fired at the US-UK base in Diego Garcia. The US claims one was intercepted in flight and the other one failed in flight. It's not clear how close they came to Diego Garcia before they were intercepted/failed, but Diego Garcia is between 2300 and 2500 miles from the launch site in Iran. Iran may have also hit Dimona, Israel's non-nuclear, non-facility, which designs, tests (and fabricates?) Israel's non-nuclear nuclear arsenal. Significant damage wasn't reported, but I haven't seen before-and-after satellite comparisons yet. The Jerusalem Post said the strike hit the neighborhood next to Dimona, and not the complex itself. However, open-source OSINT observers say the strike hit a newly-built shelter within the complex. Either way, the rumor mill says Iran was trying to take out Israel's nuclear brain-trust with this strike.
3. Trump gave Iran an ultimatum on Saturday to open the Strait of Hormuz in 48 hours or else. Those 48 hours are just about up. Waiting to see if there's any stick to back up his demand...
4. Trump also claims that the Iranians are negotiating for peace and there will be a deal soon. The Iranians said that they haven't entered into any negotiations.
5. The talking heads and X commentariat suggest that the US and Israel have divergent opinions on what the exit strategy is, with Netanyahu dissatisfied with the US wanting to exit the conflict. The usual anonymous official sources say the US is upset that Israel has been targeting Iran's oil facilities. I think it was in a Haaretz opinion piece that I read that Jared Kushner was able to persuade Trump to go along with the Israeli strike on Iran because of its oil resources. All of this is whispers and should be taken with a grain of salt. But the fact that whispers are occurring suggests tension between Israeli and US aims and positions.
CHINA:
1. Speaking of whispers, the rumor coming out of China is that over 30 Chinese radar technicians and advisors are either dead or missing in Iran. All these techies came from the 14th, 22nd, and 38th Technical Institutes, and all these research institutions are involved in various aspects of radar systems. Back in China, the CCDI (Central Committee of Discipline and Inspection) has reportedly been interviewing hundreds of engineers, managers, and finance people from these organizations.
2. Four movers and shakers, all eminent engineers in China's military corporations, have also been removed from the China Academy of Engineering's list of members: radar expert Wu Manqing, Managing Director of the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), and missile guidance and control expert Wei Yiyin. All of them are senior management types, as well as political advisory roles. And a certain Mr. Zhao (I don't have his first name), an expert in condensed matter physics and part of China's nuclear brain trust, has been removed from the CAE. Wu and Wei, Mr. Radar and Mr. Missile, are particularly interesting because they were involved in the systems that failed miserably in Iran and Venezuela. The fourth person in this drama is Yang Wei. He was removed last year as the Deputy Manager of China's Aviation Industry Corporation, which makes Chinese military jets. He was once listed as an expert in stealth technology and was known as the father of China's J20 stealth fighter. He was also an alternate member of the CCP's Central Committee. There are now questions about whether China's anti-stealth radar developers and its J20 developers systemically falsified their data. These were all Xi's hallmark achievements where China matched or exceeded the West's technical capabilities.
3. On top of all this defense industry turmoil, a hacker group calling itself Flaming China claimed it broke into China's National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin, allegedly resulting in the theft of over 10 petabytes of sensitive research data.
4. Coincidentally, China has changed its tone about Taiwan. Last Wednesday, Chen Binhua, a spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s State Council, said, “Peaceful reunification would create significant opportunities for Taiwan's economic and social development and bring tangible benefits to Taiwan compatriots.” Peaceful was stressed at several points in his statement.
RUSSIA/UKRAINE:
1. Putin hasn't made any media appearances recently. He's gone silent several times in the past for as long as 10 days to 2 weeks. But armed para-military and/or FSB officers have been patrolling the streets of Moscow.
2. The reported Internet shutdown in Russia may ony be affecting Moscow and St. Petersburg.
3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
4. The Russian Spring offensive in Ukraine seems to have fizzled out before it started. Ukraine has made advances in a couple of places along the lines, and RU is moving troops and material into those places to fill the gaps. We're only talking about tens of square kilometers (or possibly a low hundred Km2). But the lack of Starlink seems to have degraded Russian response capabilities.
5. Ukraine's Ambassador to the UK, General Zaluzhnyi, has warned that Iran has obtained Russian drone technology. Although they haven't really caught up to Ukraine's tech, he says that if the US sent marines into Iran, they'd likely suffer from the 25-50 km kill zone of current drone warfare.
6. Has the US accepted Ukraine's offer of drone assistance? I see conflicting reports. Zelenskyy says he's sent over 200 advisors to the five Gulf countries. He says Ukraine has enough surplus production to supply 1,000 drones per day to allies.
>3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
While there has been a fair amount of chatter in Finland about the Russian state media going through one of its periodic bouts of chest-thumping about invading Estonia (they tend to variably target these at 1-3 Baltic countries with Estonia as a popular choice), there's nothing about them threatening Finland in local news, which tend to be quite attuned to talk of that sort. Where are you getting threats of invading Finland?
This is not really anything particularly special, the Russian state media tends to bluster about all of the neighboring countries. Have an actual troop buildout and we're talking.
IIRC, it was one of the guests on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov show the week before last. Not Margarita Simonyan (the poor girl is looking a bit less feisty since her chemo), but one of those other dudes who like to pound their fists. I can't imagine that Russia has the spare troops and armored equipment to do much. And I hear the fence that the Finns are putting up on the Russian Border is pretty high-tech.
Also, Moscow claims it's staffing up the 44th Army Corps at Petrozavodsk, about 160 km from the Finnish border. They're aiming for 15,000 troops to be stationed there, but someone said it's still barely staffed, with RU sending all its able-bodied (and a bunch of disabled-bodied) men into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
And this week, Solovyov suggested again that Russia attack two of his favorite bêtes noires, Latvia and Poland.s
Re: Iran. I try to ignore this stuff, but this is hard. I was thinking, shit what are the chances Israel drops a nuke on Iran. And I went looking on poly market... the question had been taken down, but before that the betting was at 22% yes, by the end of the year. WTF, Israel should know that the will become 'evil' among many Americans if they drop a nuke.
While I wouldn't put it past Netanyahu to want to nuke Iran, I would hope his general staff would talk him out of it. But Iran is a perfect example of why a country would want to have nukes. Everyone now knows that American guarantees can be withdrawn by a change in administration.
If they weren't already inclined to do so by Iranian aggressiveness, I'm sure the Saudi's have a team looking at the feasibility of going nuclear. Ukraine is rumored to have a team designing a prototype nuclear weapon. Taiwan probably has a team studying it. Brazil and South Africa discontinued their nuclear weapons programs, but they could probably reactivate them with minimal difficulty.
Ironically, the world might be a safer place if everyone had nukes.
I wouldn't presume to claim that I understand the medieval mindset of mullahs (correction: modern minds with a medieval religious mindset), but if they had them, don't you think they'd have used them by now? Their regime is under an existential threat, and they see themselves as the True Iranians and True Muslims, and they don't see themselves bound by 20th-century humanistic niceties. If they believe that the God of the Prophet was on their side, and given their Twelver eschatological beliefs, why wouldn't they have used their nukes by now?
Or maybe in their heart of hearts, they're not as committed to their ideology as they claim, and they're worried about their corporeal survival and the survival of their families?
I don't know.
But I can certainly envision Netanyahu, with his zero-sum 20th-century worldview, in a situation where he's running low on Iron Dome missiles and Iranian missiles are taking out critical Israeli infrastructure, giving the order to drop a special package on Qom.
I-4: This one is interesting to me, because as far as I understand, the most recent contacts never got as far as a plan, or deep, meaningful discussions, or anything like what Trump declared. It's no more than Ghalibaf freelancing diplomacy through Arab third parties. The fact that the United States has latched on to him as a potential interlocutor (and maybe future de facto leader of Iran) is a little ironic, given how establishment he is, and how hawkish he has been toward the very protesters who were at one point Mossad's and consequently the US administration's great hope for regime change. Still, if sanctions are lifted and compensation granted in a face-saving way (Strait tolls, etc.), a settlement is not impossible.
RU-1: Putin decorated the paralympians in a semi-public ceremony... about five days ago, wasn't it? I'm no Bayesian, but if I were, my priors on Putin manqué would be highly shifted in the direction of skepticism by now.
RU-2: Related to the above, +1 to those who say that the shutdowns are essentially anti-drone/anti-cyber. They've been regularly happening in the border oblasts for that reason. That they've now happened in Moscow and Piter is noteworthy and positive from Ukraine's perspective (drone ramp-up working), but I struggle to see the mechanistic explanation for how this relates to coup prevention or leads to walled-off internet or whatever.
RU-3: Finland? Is it Medvedev? I bet it's Medvedev.
Yes, I just saw the news about Putin decorating the paralympians. This is one reason I use the subject heading "fog of war": there are so many claims and counterclaims to wade through.
> 3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
Finland is probably a very dumb idea, but the Baltics are possible. That extra strength might be nothing when used against a country that is spending one third of its GDP on the military and has spent the last four years learning how to counter your every trick.
But let's say you attack three much smaller countries that have only a theoretical grasp of drone warfare. What's more, you do it in a maximally divisive way that doesn't trigger a unified NATO response. You use local pro-Russian paramilitaries to stage some protests and violently resist local police in Narva. Then have them attack Estonian police and military installations there. Then they either flee to Russia and continue attacking Estonia from across the border, Hezbollah style, or, if Estonia overplays its hand and cracks down hard on Narva, you send a limited detachment into Estonia for "peacekeeping purposes".
Estonia invokes Article 5 but isn't able to muster unanimous support. The US is busy, the UK is willing to send a warship into the Baltic Sea, Poland and Finland and the Baltics are all ready to help and send troops, but not ready to attack Russian territory.
In response to the "unprovoked escalation against peacekeeping forces" you then dump a whole load of sea mines and USVs into the Baltic and close the Suwalki Gap. If Poland or Finland try to enter Russian territory, their troops get eliminated by drones. Trump posts "the EU and Russia must MAKE PEACE NOW" on Truth Social.
NATO maintains a forward presence in the Baltics precisely so that this "maximally divisive, doesn't trigger a unified NATO response" thing basically can't happen. When you get to the stage where Russian troops go into e.g. Estonia, they're in a shooting war with, let me check my notes, Belgium, Iceland, Denmark, France, and the United States, They basically can't not be, because "before you shoot anyone, make very sure exactly which style of green camo they're wearing, and only shoot at the ones wearing the Estonian uniforms, not the Belgian or Danish or French ones", is not one you can give to an invasion force with any expectation of it being obeyed. Neither is "at every encounter, do not fire unless fired upon, even if you've been fired upon in the last ten encounters and so fifty of your comrades are now Cargo 200". Russian troops moving into Estonia absolutely will run into e.g. French soldiers, say "aha, more of those damn Estonians like the ones who shot Ivan and Alexy this morning", and shoot them.
That's the sort of thing that ensures a unified NATO response. Which, again, is the point. NATO might, in the heat of the moment, prefer not to live in a world where NATO soldiers are coming home in coffins thanks to Russian bullets and vice versa, but they've precommitted to closing off that option. The only question is, given that they're going to be A: dying and B: killing Russians, how much of that are they going to do?
The answer will almost certainly be "...enough to make sure the Russians regret starting this damn fool war", and so the amount of men and guns and tanks NATO sends to reinforce the Baltics will be calculated to be enough to make the Russians regret starting such a war. This is the low-risk option for NATO in terms of both domestic and international politics; if things go badly they can at least say "we gave it our best shot" and evacuate by sea (the Russian Baltic Fleet is a joke) or into Poland (the Polish Army is not a joke). And with most of the Russian army bogged down in Ukraine, NATO can easily spare the troops to make them regret any Baltic sideshow.
Maybe NATO will let Russia "win", but it would be a pyrrhic victory. And I'm pretty sure Putin understands this,
> You use local pro-Russian paramilitaries to stage some protests and violently resist local police in Narva. […]
I think the plausible deniability required for this would be almost impossible to pull off today. European governments and citizens have become much more sensitive to Russia's sneaky tricks after 2014, and even more so after 2022.
Was there a genuine expectation that Chinese tech in either Iran or Venenzuela would prevent US from achieving air superiority? Seems very optimistic, even if the tech was quite good. Surely it couldnt be deployed and manned at the scale necessary to hold off for long. It could still come up short on operational expectations (like the radar system never saw the plane that took it out). But that would be less visible to outside observation.
Well, the Iranians and Venezuelans who approved the purchase of the Chinese tech must have been under the impression that it was superior to the Russian offerings and as good as the US systems. In fact, people who've looked at the Chinese systems say many of them were copied whole cloth from stolen US technology. And I've heard from a South African (former) diplomat acquaintance that the Chinese use that as a selling point.
One analyst suggested that the reason the copied tech didn't work as well as the US original is that the Chinese were cutting corners on testing (and diverting some of the testing budget into their own pockets). Also, the US is continually updating its software and upgrading its electronics, so the Chinese may not have been using the latest/greatest as their model.
I'd be worried that AFAIK, there's no verified record of the U.S. military conducting direct, controlled tests of its anti-stealth radar systems against the Chinese J20 stealth fighters. The Chinese media has claimed that the J20 have flown undetected near US-supplied Taiwanese radar without being detected. These claims lack independent confirmation, though. Just because we could bypass the Chinese tech in Iran with our stealth planes, doesn't mean that China couldn't bypass ours with their stealth planes.
I wouldn't expect it to stop the US from achieving air superiority, but you would think they'd have liked to shoot down at least a few planes along the way, both for a propaganda victory and ideally some surviving pilots to use as hostages. (They did supposedly hit an F35 but the plane landed successfully in another country.) The USAF and IAF have apparently been operating with complete impunity over Iran, not even needing to be careful.
It's especially interesting in the context of the Ukraine war, where air defences have been strong enough to prevent either side operating over the other's territory.
> It's especially interesting in the context of the Ukraine war, where air defences have been strong enough to prevent either side operating over the other's territory.
That's because both countries have inherited the Soviet doctrine that emphasized A2/AD over achieving air superiority.
Well, most countries have terribly underfunded air defence to begin with, as we are now learning. Also, the dismantling of Iranian air defence began a year ago in the 12 day war, when Israel eliminated many of their generals. They have likely been too uncoordinated and exposed to set up proper defences.
It's a difficult problem to solve, you need very good tech, and defending is 10:1 more expensive than attacking.
> 3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
Maybe they're hoping that China/North Korea will pick up the slack ? In addition, while Russia doesn't have the troops for a full-scale ground invasion, they have effectively infinite amounts of drones/missiles/artillery with which to bombard the Baltics and maybe Finland as well. Regardless of the degree of success, at the very least pressure on these other countries will distract the West from Ukraine, thus reducing military aid and possibly allowing Russia to finally force Ukraine to surrender.
Distract them by.....encouraging them to blow up Russian infrastructure and people with extreme prejudice? That doesn't seem to work to the benefit of Russia's Ukraine ambitions.
I don't think that Estonia or Finland have the means to do that by themselves. The US will most likely decline to get involved at all, and Europe will try to exhaust every other possible option before committing any troops or fielding their own artillery/air support assets.
What other options do they have? Take it lying down? And I don't think that Estonia and Finland would necessarily be fighting qua Estonia and Finland given that they're a NATO countries and opposing Russian aggression is the whole point of the alliance. Trump has done horrific damage to said alliance, but that's not a reason for disunity in Europe.
> What other options do they have? Take it lying down?
I think that, should Putin invade (or simply engage in sustained bombardment), they would look at the situation in Ukraine and weigh their options. Certainly Ukraine demonstrated that resistance is possible -- but at what price, and for how long ? Faced with the choice between keeping their independence in the short to medium term at the cost of many lives and virtually their entire infrastructure; and surrendering their autonomy in the long term but keeping their people alive and power stations intact; Estonia and Finland may very well rationally choose the latter.
> And I don't think that Estonia and Finland would necessarily be fighting qua Estonia and Finland given that they're a NATO countries
I think that NATO is effectively dead. Yes, it will continue to exist on paper, but faced with a realistic Russian threat short of a nuclear strike and/or an open and explicit declaration of war on all of the West, they will express grave concern and promise support and maybe send a few actual advisors... but not much else. The US is effectively out of the alliance, and the European countries have neither the resources nor the political will to resist Russia+China+North Korea.
Is there any reason to believe that China and NK would support a hypothetical Russian invasion into the Baltics?
Because I always figured that in any kind of prolonged conflict Russia wouldn't be able to take Europe. Just on account of the differences in economic power.
I believe in 2022 you could've argued about Russia's large stockpiles and the element of surprise, both of these are now gone. Unlike Russia, Europe has not moved to a war economy, but defense spending increased a lot and other measures have been taken to increase readiness. In my country mandatory military service has been reintroduced and reportedly military personel numbers are on the rise again even before factoring that in.
So I think the only way Russia takes the Baltics or Finland is if the remainder of the alliance says "Fuck it, not my problem".
Russia probably hoped that would be our reaction to Ukraine and they've been wrong about that. I'm thinking if an actual NATO ally was attacked they'd at least be twice as wrong.
The scenario you're describing in your first paragraph is utterly ridiculous in 2026. In 2021 it would have been a different story, but five years later, most of Russia's heavy equipment has been destroyed, the remainder is mostly garbage, their air force is mostly neutralized, and most of their army consists of barely trained recruits and cripples serving as drone magnets. For fucks sake, they're riding on donkeys and mopeds to the front line.
Oh, and almost all of their personnel is bound in Ukraine. For a mass attack they'd have to draw away 100,000s of soldiers away from Ukraine. I think we'd notice this rather quickly.
As a European and someone who's following the Ukraine war, this post shows a profound misunderstanding of how Europeans and Ukranians weigh a possible Russian occupation, and of the military power of the respective parties
Um, no. They're extremely high profile targets for being blown up as part of SEAD operations. I'm basically assuming they were in the vicinity when the radars were destroyed.
> The Russian Spring offensive in Ukraine seems to have fizzled out before it started.
It's rasputica season. Until the ground dries up it's impossible to conduct any large-scale operations. Both sides are literally stuck in the mud right now.
Mud is still a major factor. While dismounted infantry is less slowed down by mud than vehicles, they still have to be supplied. They need ammunition for their guns and mortars, they need new drones, they need food and water. Artillery further back needs lots of safe firing positions to avoid counter-battery fire.
You should try crawling through knee-deep cold wet mud to see how much it can discourage action.
Yeah. I thought the spring mud narrative was back when maneuver warfare was the assumption, tanks armor etc. if its infantry creeping around to capture drone operator nodes, mud doesnt seem like it would be the same disabler.
Thanks for the updates by the way. I hadnt seen any of that China discussion
Major clarification: MOBILE Internet shutdowns are affecting Moscow and St. Petersburg, and only during drone attacks. It's also nothing new: regions closer to the border has been experiencing same mobile net shutdowns for months already.
Wired internet works as usual (aside from Telegram, which has been blocked, but is still accessible through proxies and VPNs; there are some reports that DPI hardware is overwhelmed by the block and Telegram's response DDoS attack on RosKomNadzor's servers, and that caused WhatsApp to be unblocked randomly; I can second-hand confirm that WhatsApp is sometimes accessible without VPNs, but the reason is unclear).
> armed para-military and/or FSB officers have been patrolling the streets of Moscow.
No signs of those as of today in city center.
> Putin hasn't made any media appearances recently.
I don't know about media appearances, but Armenians confirmed telephone call with him yesterday.
All in all, the part about Russia (and possible Ukraine) seems to be mostly composed of propaganda-derived information. I understand that it's hard to get any other, especially if you don't know the language, but one should try harder.
And I guess they're not turning off the mobile phone networks near their oil facilties.
And Ukraine just hit the Primorsk oil terminal on the Baltic again. This is RU's largest oil export facility that's still operational on the western side of the country. Videos of the tank farm burning have been posted on X, and Ukraine says they also damaged the oil loading infrastructure.
And Ukraine also hit the Ufa oil refinery in the Republic of Bashkortostan. That's all the way over in the foothills of the Urals. About 1100 miles or 1800 km as the crow flies from Ukraine, but probably further because Ukrainian Flamingos etc. follow the winding river valleys and stay close to the ground to avoid radar detection.
Shutting down mobile network is not a guarantee that drone won't hit anything, it's just another counter-measure, and may or may not work. Drones on both sides are known to use mobile network, although the exact use was never made clear. Since only the mobile internet is shut down, while cell connection stays up, my guess is that drones don't use cell towers for triangulation (probably due to low precision) even in cases where GPS is jammed. It's not impossible, though, that they send back some kind of telemetry, or even camera feed, and may accept control signals in turn. The delay would make any last-second course corrections impossible, but a human operator still can make some decisions, like highlighting targets before the final approach. The discovery of SIM cards in drone debris prove that internet is used for something, anyway.
I think the hypothesis that the government wants to control the flow of negative information is more likely. It's also the simpler explanation, since Ukraine has admitted its long-range drones rely on GNSS and INS.
How would shutting down cell phone towers do anything to prevent Ukrainian drone strikes? Long-range Ukrainian drones' primary means of navigation are based on GNSS and INS. GNSS (e.g., GPS/GLONASS/Galileo) for global positioning and inertial navigation systems (INS) to continue navigating when signals are jammed. They're specifically designed to be independent from ground infrastructure, like cell towers, which can be taken offline. That's why RU has concentrated all its GNSS-jamming equipment around Moscow and St. Petersburg (and short-changing the frontlines).
And why are they suddenly doing it now? Why weren't they doing it when Ukraine started hitting Moscow in 2024? And it seems like this a broader crackdown than just cell phone networks.
Why now? Because of growing number of drones, and because infrastructure and laws to make shutdowns possible took time. Moscow was hit by a couple of drones at the beginning of war, then largely left alone, but currently Ukraine is ramping up efforts to reach the city, it seems, so shutdowns now kind of make sense. As for St. Petersburg, it's speculated that Baltic countries are letting Ukraine use their airspace for a more covert approach from the sea these days.
Is this a part of some kind of a bigger crackdown? I'm not seeing it. The article you linked also mostly talks about mobile internet only (the rest - blocking of some social networks, sites and messengers mostly isn't a new development, aside from the recent block on Telegram which I mentioned). The country IS probably moving toward Chinese model of internet restrictions, but this particular round of shutdowns imo entirely due to increased production of Ukrainian long-range drones.
That's true of the usual sort of long-range drone strike, against fixed targets known from satellite imagery or the like. But in some cases, e.g. Operation Spiderweb ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb ), the Ukrainians have used Russian mobile networks for real-time control and detailed targeting of drones. So it's certainly plausible that the Russians might shut down mobile networks when they fear imminent drone attack.
My understanding is that cell phone networks were useful for targeting cell phone *users* for short-range drones along the front lines. And, yes, Operation Spiderweb used Russian SIM cards for the C-and-C communications. But my understanding was this for the local operators who had snuck into the country.
I don't know when it happened, but Russia implemented bans on international incoming calls from "unfriendly countries" (i.e., Ukraine), and WhatsApp, Viber, FaceTime have been blocked or restricted for ages. Not sure how a RU SIM could communicate C-and-C info back to Ukraine.
Though I did find Gawdflea's theses a little painful to read, this one is actually coherent if you consider Donbas (well, I suppose Donbass, nowadays) separatists to be Ukrainians.
Coherent, but not quite true. Ukraine is capable of attacking Belgorod and Kursk with drones fairly regularly, let alone Donetsk and Luhansk.
"There are cities in the breakaway republics that were being bombed on a daily basis for years, until Russia invaded."
This is false as stated (daily basis for years) even if one is charitable and substitutes shelling for bombing.
"Let's just say, when you're dropping real bombs, and not 'ittie bittie drones', that buildings are kinda wrecked."
Oh, for heaven's sake. Are you suggesting that the current war *prevented* the physical destruction of Donbass cities and towns? Donetsk is a ghost of its former self. The capital just about abides, but everywhere else much of the population has fled. Soledar, Artyomovsk, Marinka, Chasiv Yar, Krasnoarmeysk, Ugledar, and Avdiivka, all of which had readily endured the prior eight years of fighting between the government and separatists, are now destroyed or abandoned.
"We'll just repeat that Azov threatened to assassinate Zelensky if he stopped bombing the Eastern Ukraine (erm? would you rather I call it something else?)"
They repeatedly rejected his authority to order withdrawals and agree to cease-fires, yes. I revile Azov and their ilk as much as the next man, and I have a very low opinion of the way in which the Ukrainian national identity has been shaped post-2014. None of that backs up your claims of wholesale bombing prior to the full-scale war, or of security for the people of the annexed oblasts having now been achieved.
The Canary Institute has a working paper up, with a new framework for understanding the potential economic impact of AI. Headline result: half the time in the economy is **already** reachable by AI, and it will be going up soon:
Trump is threatening to attack another NATO country, Denmark, to take Greenland. The other NATO countries can no longer trust that the US is on their side. Therefore some of them will likely get nukes to defend themselves against Russia. Or against the US even.
The more countries have nukes the more likely that there will be a nuclear war that wipes out humanity. The more countries have nukes the more likely that a crazy country leader or general or similar starts a nuclear war. Or that a nuclear war is triggered by a nuke launched by mistake.
By threatening to attack NATO, I think Trump has doubled the chances of humanity going extinct by nuclear war in the next 50 years. If Trump does attack NATO he’ll likely double the chances again.
The Republican Party is a bigger existential threat than AI.
The French already have nukes that are poised to attack the United States. Though their main targets are Poland and Germany. (Seriously.)
Also: If you apply this reasoning consistently then the Chinese build up is already a non-theoretical thing that's happening. And was before Trump. Turning nuclear binary game theory into trinary is WAY more of a threat. Why is that not your bigger concern?
Given that my information is correct unless the French military is lying I'm going to give it a roughly 99% chance of being correct. French nuclear strategy is public.
French military doctrine explicitly includes rapid fire capabilities to hit the United States and has since the Cold War. It also has a doctrine of nuking allies territory if they are losing a war and feel nukes will slow down the advancing army (mostly in Germany and now Poland). It also has the "warning shot" doctrine (ultime avertissement) where French doctrine allows the use of a single nuclear weapon lower on the escalation ladder than anyone else.
That said, I agree the chances of France doing it to the US are low. On the other hand, China has been going through a massive re-armament such that we are approaching a world with three major nuclear powers. And I do think that is destabilizing.
I agree in general that it is absolutely terrible for any number of reasons that Trump threatened to invade Greenland (perfidy, aggression, damage to NATO, short-term risk of war, etc), but I am not sure this particular line of argument follows.
In particular, at least two other NATO countries (Britain and France) already have their own moderately substantial nuclear arsenals. I suppose other NATO countries might want their own independent deterrents, but off the top of my head the main candidates from a technical and fiscal perspective are either closely aligned with one of the existing nuclear powered (e.g. Canada with Britain) or have internal political reasons pushing them against building nukes (e.g. Germany).
Do note however that Britain's nuclear deterrent is based entirely on missiles that they rent from the United States. Britain has the technical means to build a wholly independent nuclear arsenal, but for economic reasons their submarines sail to King's Bay, Georgia to fill up with US-made Trident missiles before returning to Faslane to have British thermonuclear warheads installed.
Were I the British PM, I would suspect these missiles might mysteriously malfunction if launched towards the United States, and would not have high confidence that they would deter the United States of anything.
France's nuclear deterrent, at least, is wholly French.
Interesting. The concept of renting a single-use weapon system seems curious to me, although I suppose if Britain did have to use them, they'd have bigger concerns than forfeiting their deposit and the US would likewise have bigger concerns than collecting on any overage.
Yes, I would have similar concerns were I the British PM. I've read enough Harry Turtledove novels to imagine improvised ways of delivering a warhead somewhere inconvenient without a missile, but such measures would be orders of magnitude less practical and effective as a deterrent.
Statistically, fire insurance is almost certainly single-use (or zero-use!) and we still pay for that. (I don’t promise that the analogy is sound, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head.)
The missiles are also drawn from the same pool as the ones on US submarines. A British SSBN shows up in King's Bay, deposits its old worn-out missiles, gets the next sixteen freshly-refurbished missiles in the pipeline, and heads back to Scotland. There are no missiles that are marked "property of the United Kingdom", there are just missiles that the crown has paid to have sit in the tubes of His Majesty's Submarine for the time being, and will probably spend most of their service life in American submarines,
I don’t know enough about how these missiles work, but it occurs to me we probably wouldn’t want even our *own* missiles to be launched at American targets. Is it plausible that *all* the missiles we manufacture have that targeting restriction built in?
I mean, it seems more likely that the targeting system lives outside the missile? But it would be amusing. On the other hand, it seems you are rebutting yourself here, so perhaps I should stay out of it. ;-)
Agreed. "Has threatened", yes, but last I heard he'd backed down in exchange for minor concessions about basing rights that allowed him to save a bit of face. As I understand it, the concessions are either affirmations of long-standing treaties or at most stuff that the US could probably have obtained at any point by asking nicely.
I have not heard anything about "is threatening" in the present tense.
What was the chance of Denmark realistically ever saying "no" before Trumps Greenland-threats? Denmark specifically was and is one of NATOs most involved members, certainly when measured on a per-capita basis.
This isn't comparable to the Ukraine-Russia relations in any meaningful way, other than in the "the opposite of"-kind of comparison.
Hm, but why? The US and Denmark were strong allies, and Denmark letting the US have a more-or-less permanent base on Greenland is surely considered an asset for Denmark, no? It provides extra security against traditional aggressors, it provides ample opportunity for joint training and personnel exchange. Why would Denmark in a before-Trump situation ever throw them out? They gain more than it costs them.
Maybe there is some misunderstanding here between us?
My experience, which is from the around 1980, is probably so dinosaurian as to be useless today. But honestly, the thing that really tipped things for me was when I gave up and stopped looking. That was when I suddenly became interesting to a whole handful of women, including the one who is now my dear wife. My only explanation is that I had been exuding a desperation that was off-putting.
I’m one of those people who dislikes dating, you can hate dating and still find a partner, just like you can hate going to open houses, but still buy a home you like. I think it’s a tractable problem if you put enough time, energy and resources into it.
I feel like pretty much every task I'm taking on, except dating, is fundamentally linear: there is a thing I can go do at will, and if I keep doing the thing I get better at it. Though all the things I do, I enjoy doing for their own sake.
I don't have that with dating, a concrete action I can take regularly that I enjoy. Only thing that comes to mind is grinding it out on the apps, which is seriously tedious and soul sucking. I feel like 95% of the profiles seem boring.
- tight, shaped, form fitting, a little uncomfy designer button down shirt, black or dark blue, sleeves rolled up and a big medallion hanging from the neck (gives the aesthetics a a center)
- tight, somewhat uncomfy dress jeans, does not have to be designer
- black shoes
- sunglasses on first pic (for style), without on the second (for trust)
- absolutely no prescription glasses, make them look like sunglasses (mine are like aviators, because Top Gun look always beats scientist look)
- 8 shitty selfies then prompting image generator AI with it, no catfishing ,recognizable, just best angle, lighting etc. background is nature
Online Dating 101: focus on clothes, elegant but unconventional: waistcoat, rolled up sleeves, bolo tie in the shape of a gemstone, that sort of stuff. Classy yet not boring, suggests success, quality, class, yet independence from social norms. They don't need to be expensive. Just make them all black for the sake of simplicity, but dark blue shirts also work. Sort of suggests "poor aristocrat". That is romantic. Dress jeans. Leather shoes.
Then take 8 shitty selfies and ask gemini to generate a realistic, yet romantic and professional, recognizable set of pics from them, background should be nature, like park. Do not catfish, should still be recognizably you, just well presented.
The most important thing is to be physically attractive which is being in shape, fixing aesthetic issues (teeth, hair, skin, etc), and dressing well. The next most important thing is being in a social environment where you meet potential partners frequently. Try to gain some status in the group ideally. If you're a woman that's basically it.
If you're a man there's additional things. Firstly money and social class (which is mostly university degrees as well as certain jobs). Secondly you need to get used to approaching women and asking them out. Thirdly learn enough photography and such to have a decent dating profile.
Physical attraction of men in the way you think about it is wildly overrated in dating. I'll make an exception for dressing reasonably well, doesn't have to be over the top though (just don't be a bum, don't have smelly clothes, dress accordingly).
Status games are wildly unattractive to many people, including potential partners. If one doesn't like status games, they shouldn't start playing them in order to find a mate. It is not a sustainable behavior if you don't like it, so you are essentially tricking your partner (and potentially yourself into a bad internal life).
Photography for a dating profile is .. weird. I would not be attracted to anyone with curated photographs if it is not something that is part of their regular life (for example, being a model/some other profession with lots of photographs, or a photographer themselves). But other people might be attacted to such measures. Question again is, is it yourself or are you bending to conform to a perceived succesful dating style/profile?
"Be yourself" sounds cliche and non-descript, but it still rings true to me. If you don't have an interesting life according to your own feelings, you won't have an interesting dating life either. One of my main hobbies is practically devoid of the opposite sex, and it still makes me attractive to my mate (who has nothing to do with that hobby) due to some skills and personality characteristics I have attained through it.
That's how I think too. I think my life is very interesting by my own standard, but I can't think of any way to display it in social media or a dating app profile.
Then stop giving a fuck about apps and socials .. I know it might sound ignorant for you. But you might think about giving it a try for a year or so? Just delete all that shit and go bird watching instead.
My perspective is that dating is 99% about finding the right partner, and 1% about not screwing things up. If dating is difficult then you're simply not dating the right person.
I spent so long, when I was single, trying to somehow make myself so irresistibly attractive that even women with whom I was completely incompatible would still want to go out with me for some reason.
Honestly, the best option is to start making large sums of money. You can then spend that money on improving your looks (e.g. hiring personal trainers) and signaling wealth (e.g. buying expensive watches).
Looks can be improved from $1000 just buying elegant but unconventional clothes, waistcoat, rolled up sleeves shirts, bolo ties. Women dig aesthetics and style more than they dig bodies.
But maybe the good kind of divisive. Having said that, opening the top three buttons and having a visible medal in the neck also works. I am not sure I understand the logic, but some decoration in that body region truly holds the picture together.
Bolos and medallions / necklaces could be a cultural thing. There are plenty of American women who would either be attracted to or neutral about them, but I suspect there are many, many more who'd feel the ick.
In my experience, this is something that people with attractive bodies say all the time. Sadly, I am not one of those, and I'm here to tell you this statement isn't necessarily true.
Clothes cover bodies, so anything beyond extreme obesity works there. A waistcoat can hide a smallish belly and a suit jacket can make narrow shoulders wider. Which is exactly why they were invented.
In case of of extreme obesity, the only good solution is the full three-piece suit, no matter how outdated that looks. Like this pic, kinda looks like royalty: https://jp.pinterest.com/pin/977984875314480017/
I feel that if one is posting ACX comments asking about dating advice, one cannot afford to be too choosy. And I say this as someone who's been single for a long time...
Yes absolutely. I went from 0 online dates to 4 with women I found very attractive in 2 weeks, could have gone a lot more but Married one of them: here is what I did. Lowest hanging fruit first.
1. Go online and read more advice for men from reputable reddits.
2. Get a decent short haircut and well groomed facial hair with a bit of beard if possible (really helps achieve a masculine jawline) do Google image comparisons if you don't believe me. Also read up how to dress in general. I bought new shoes, pants, and shirts
3. Buy a tripod to take candid seeming pictures of yourself in good lighting (I bought big bright lamps), good clothing, and pay for photofeeler (website) to get the top 4-5 (NOT MORE!) pictures of yourself in this way (or older photos). Photos should have you smiling.
4. Pay for Tinder and Bumble (etc) premium for a few months so you don't have to swipe ( it just gives you people who swiped on you) Restart your profile to remarket to people who may have dismissed you previously. Have a short, honest, non cringe description.
5. Learn how to converse on text chat and to get to date.
5. (Sorry about numbering) Memorize conversation starters (like 10+ very different) so you can recovery any awkward silences during the date.
6 Commit to no kiss on first date and ALWAYS go for kiss on second. I based this on studies about womens expectations. Takes pressure off me to "decide" mid date. Needless to say, work out well beforehand how you're going to pull it off near end of date.
7. (I didn't do this) Use the mathematically optimal way to decide number of people to date before settling down. See numberphile YouTube video on toilet selection (yes really)
8 (I didn't do this) people rarely think about this: New York has 10x more women than a smaller area. If you can move to a denser area, it could easily be Worth it. Getting married can decide your future as much as a job.
See more online advice on all these points and more. Good luck.
Feel free to DM me for more details. Always happy to help someone struggling with dating. It can suck with the wrong strategy
Seriously, walking a dog is a great way to meet fellow dog walkers, especially as it is a regular routine with similar or identical routes so one can build up an acquaintance over a few increasingly personal encounters.
Of course, this assumes one is living in a town, where dog walkers are concentrated in parks and similar, and it might not work so well in rural areas.
Quiz mights are another way to get to know people, who might include suitable matches.
Re #3: just hire a professional. They will do a better job with photos than you will at home with a tripod. They are literal pros at making people look good on camera, and they deal with awkward/shy people all the time! A good photographer is surprisingly cheap for what you get.
I tried that first actually but got bad results. Advantage with doing it yourself is you can take a lot of photos in different outfits, etc. way cheaper.
But it must be a reasonable dog, i.e. neither a slavering pit bull nor at the other extreme a pink-dyed camp poodle (although the latter might be suitable, depending on who you wished to meet!)
Also, think twice before buying a greyhound, unless you like rising at 4am each morning to take the brute for a ten mile walk/jog before having to leave for work! They also have zero personality, and come to life only when chasing some unfortunate animal to kill! (When my sister's family moved to a new house, the first thing their greyhound did was to maul the neighbor's cat. It took a team of vetinary surgeons hours, working round the clock, to save the cat, and my sister received the huge bill!)
I would say a good "talking point" breed is a dachshund, but any small to medium sized, or at least friendly, dog would do.
Seconding all this. Legionaire is giving the strongest evidence-based advice right now for optimizing app based dating.
A couple of nuances:
1. NYC specifically is an Empyrean Valhalla for single men, because there are more college educated women age 20-28 than anywhere else (density), but also gender ratios are vastly on your side. If you take this advice as applying to moving to SF or LA or other large metros, it won't work nearly as well as NYC specifically.
Also, outside of this advice, which is specifically app-based, there is a broader strategic consideration - every single dating app has ~3 men for every woman, they're 75/25. Pure supply and demand arguments shows that this is a hugely unfavorable environment for the large amount of men who can't stand out, and who aren't top quintile or better.
This is driven by the fact that only ~20% of women use dating apps (40% try them, but half get The Ick and stop pretty soon).
The better way to meet and date women for those men is by doing interesting things in real life, in social groups, where women can get to know you and evaluate you over a longer term.
The hard part here (at least for most men) is that all their hobbies are 90/10 men/women and those 10 women are partnered up already. I know, I've always been that guy too, with 90%+ male-dominated hobbies and interests.
But it is then contingent upon you to undertake the effort and start doing things actual women enjoy. Dancing (ballroom, salsa, etc) is a great one, vastly imbalanced and always looking for men, as are things like yoga and aerials and cooking classes and "drunk painting" and things like that.
I have a number of posts that are relevant in this domain, but I'll just link one:
Speaking to point 7 and "optimal stopping," I do some monte carlo simulations and show that the formal Secretary Problem optimal stopping solution has you evaluating too many candidates, and that you're better off evaluating ~10-15% instead of 30%.
While numbers may favor single men in New York that's unfortunately not the full story. The city is chock-full of high income, high achieving men, think finance bros for example, and a man of more modest income will have a really tough time competing. Things might have gotten a little better with so much of the financial sector relocating to Miami, but it might not yet be enough to be significant.
It wouldn't be as difficult for average men if it weren't for the fact that women tend to be patient when it comes to waiting for the perfect man to come along. It's common for men to think that women are willing to settle for average men when they realize it's taking longer than expected to find a perfect one, but that isn't true.
I never had horrible problems dating in high population density areas because I am lucky enough to be moderately attractive with decent social skills. However, I basically optimized the above while living in a low density area to maximize dates to find wife material.
2-5 are the most easily actionable and should definitely be done. I felt pretty gay making a homemade tripod and setting it up in my backyard but it was worth it. I also felt lame paying for bumble/hinge premium but it was worth it.
I would also say if you really, really like someone, make sure a second date is set up ASAP, and ensure you let them know you really like them by the end of the second date.
I think in my case the thing was just realizing that it was a skill that I could develop through deliberate practice. And probably a secondary thing was realizing that there is some good advice out there, even though the vast majority of dating advice is complete dross.
Uhhhh, I don't think there's one big thing or one big trick, other than the realization that everyone who comments on dating on the internet is bullshitting, mostly by sharing what they think should work instead of what does.
A few things that have worked for me and will (probably) work for you.
On the apps:
- Dress better. Definitely boots>sneakers and preferably suit over t-shirt. Some guys don't need good clothes to look good. Most guys do. Play the odds.
- Get good photos. Preferably from a professional photographer. AI might work these days, haven't tried it. Depressingly effective.
- Pay for the Premium thingy on the apps. It works.
- Get her off the app as fast as possible, preferably out for coffee the next day. Having a long chat on the app and getting to know each other there doesn't work and, in retrospect, is as dumb as it sounds.
In person:
I dunno, do you need advice? In mixed groups, relationships just kinda form organically over time and it's awesome. Unfortunately, those have been on the decline since "Bowling Alone" and the trends are not good.
>Having a long chat on the app and getting to know each other there doesn't work and, in retrospect, is as dumb as it sounds.
It absolutely works for me. But maybe it is different for those who look for BDSM subs and not romantic. That always takes weeks of negotiations. Still, I would probably do weeks of texting even if romantic, because I do not really believe in looks based chemistry but more like similar brains developing intellectual and organic chemistry.
Mixed groups are stupid, why would you you want your dating pool be like 15 people.
I just don't have any mixed groups, even though I belong to like 3 groups at present. Haven't found overlap between my interests and women.
An older woman who saw me again after some months recently said that I look way better now, like I'm positively glowing. And it's true, in those months I think I resolved a good chunk of inner discord. Which leads me to believe now I just need to be in the right room at the right time, although, I don't know what that right room would be.
Try going to arranged in person mingles, like those on meetup.com. Its not that youll necessarily gets lots of dates from these(though you might), but the practise of talking to a stranger and asking her out is useful and you can start deploying it in other contexts. A confident cold approach in a context where the woman is not being inundated with unwanted attention(like she is at a bar) can give good odds for the effort involved
I don’t know the modern landscape very well, but I do know that people respond to someone who seems comfortable, interested, and not like they’re trying to force an outcome. Just start with making female friends, maybe? One thing does lead to another sometimes.
What's your goal? At first I assumed you wanted to find a mate, then I wondered maybe you want to keep "dating" as an end, not a means to an end.
If your goal is the former, stop thinking in dating-terms. Truly see at as (one of many) means to an end, but stop giving a fuck about the process details. All its meant to do is make people meet, the rest follows (or not, for good reasons).
Sonder is a made-up word that means: the profound realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid, complex, and filled with personal stories as your own. I saw a woman on twitter horrified that this word exists: surely everyone realizes that as a child? Don't you have to be a horrible narcissist to not see this is true?
This amused me, because I have to admit that, even intellectually, I do not understand sonder, I have a hard time believing random people have a life as vivid and complex as my own. The personal stories, yes, that I believe, but then, I find personal stories boring, I even find my own personal stories boring.
Do you understand sonder? Or actually, something I'm especially interested in: what's the most intense experience of sonder you've ever had? A time someone really surprised you with how complex their life is?
The idea that *every* random passerby is living a life *just* as vivid, complex, and filled with personal stories as everyone else is extremely silly!
Aphantasia is a real thing.
So are comparative intelligence and trauma and agoraphobia and every other condition and life experience that would inform one's experience of vividness, one's complexity, and one's wealth of personal stories.
It would be more accurate to say that "any random passerby *MIGHT* be living a life as vivid, complex, and filled with personal stories as your own, but you can't know who."
Both the person who made up the word sonder and the woman on Twitter who was horrified not everyone believed it are narcissists imposing their understanding of themselves on everyone else.
That's like saying it's narcissistic to assume other people are as smart as me.
Narcissism is about assuming you're special and important and other people don't matter. It might be stupid in some way to assume other people are generally like you, but it's not "narcissistic".
Sure, technically grandiosity is not a requirement. But which of the nine current diagnostic criteria is remotely in line with "believing other people are like you"?
"A belief that he or she is special and unique[...]"?
"A lack of empathy (unwillingness to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others)"?
"A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes"?
Thinking that you have a rich internal life far beyond that of most people is definitionally a lot more like narcissism than the converse.
And yeah, you can find sonder all the time if you just actively listen to people without imposing an agenda.
E.g. I remember several months ago, I was speaking with my uncle at a family gathering. He's a retired chef with a bunch of accolades. And we got into a very long conversation about the culinary arts, despite me having 0 knowledge in it. And then later, I saw him at Christmas. Out of the blue, he asked me if I knew anything about bitcoin. And I'm not an evangelist by any means, but he knew I was vaguely nerdy. So we had another lengthy chat, and I explained to him what I knew at a level he could understand, and he was really impressed.
edit: wait, I remember the *mostest* sonder experience. It was when I was working in retail, and a coworker started telling me about his plans about the zombie apocalypse. At first, I assumed he was being ironic. But he kept going on, and on, and on. About how he's gonna hide out in the local school, and then drive to alaska with his friends because it's cold, and how bolt-actions are more efficient than machine guns, and idek. He just kept going on and on and on. Eventually, it became clear that he was not joking. He'd spent far too much time thinking about this subject for the topic to have been fascetious.
That may be the origin of the word. The original video from Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (as far as I know, the source of the word) uses an English pronunciation (rhymes with "yonder" and with what in German would be a double s).
>I saw a woman on twitter horrified that this word exists: surely everyone realizes that as a child? Don't you have to be a horrible narcissist to not see this is true?
When my daughter was still a preschooler and showed no need for privacy I'd sometimes ask her what she was thinking. And her answers always surprised me. One I remember especially well came up one time when we were in the car on our way somewhere, probably a playground. I asked what she was thinking, and she was thinking about a character in a cartoon she had seen -- wondering what would he do in some situation. The specificity, the absolute unguessability, of what she had been thinking startled me. I realized that I had had the feeling I knew the general sort of mental content she had. I knew what she had done all morning with me, and a lot she had told or showed me about how she thought and felt. I knew what she liked about the park. And I was driving along with the idea that that stuff was pretty much all of her mental content -- today's events so far, what the park was going to be like. But in fact she was thinking of something unrelated. I knew my own thoughts weren't related in any simple way to what we'd done that day and what we were about to do. They were probably a mishmash of that stuff, current hopes and worries and plans, and random other topics -- Chernobyl, mortality, that thing Jan said one time, sex . . . But it hadn't been real to me that her thoughts were the same kind of mishmash, except with topics from her store of hopes and interests and experiences instead of mine.
I am still prone to the same error. My default view of other people's experience is way too simple, especially if they are strangers. If I see them in the grocery store, I think of them as thinking about their groceries. Yet I know, really, that their mental content is as diverse as mine. Even if I'm with a close friend I make smaller versions of the same kind of error. If we're having dinner and talking, I think of them as thinking about whatever we're talking about, what we're eating, and me. I'm more aware of some nuances though. If they look sad or worried while we're talking, I know that some concern they don't want to bring up is crossing their mind. And of course I myself have lots of thought unrelated to what we are talking about.
It is very hard to stay fully aware of the complexity of other people, and how much of what is in their minds is unguessable. I think we're wired to default to a simplified view of what's going on in their minds. That woman on twitter exclaiming with horror about sonder was just performing a standard twitter move -- a certain kind of putdown. Either that or she was a terrible phenomenologist.
Great comment, thanks. I think I'm going to start asking "what are you thinking about right now?" every time there is a pause in a conversation with someone.
Here’s a funny story about that. I’m going to PT for a back problem, and recently my PT saw me frowning while doing an exercise and asked whether it hurt. Actually I was frowning because I was fretting about how to get cat throw-up out of a green fake fur throw I have. So I told him that, and he looked quite startled, then laughed. You never know what you’ll hear!
I think the division might be in understanding that its true in the abstract vs interacting with ppl as though its true. The listen to ppl instead of waiting for your turn to talk thing. Honestly i cant say I really do that. But I imagine that some of the extremely friendly and empathic ppl out there are just actualizing sonder.
It usually happens to me when the scale is suddenly reduced. When you ride a crowded subway train at 8am every day, it's hard to treat people around you as more than NPC. But when you find yourself on the 6am train on a Sunday, you look at the five people in the car with you and can't help but wonder what's their story is, why did they have to take the first train of the day.
Or when you look at the highway outside your apartment at 23:55 on the 31st of December and see a few cars drive by. Who are these people? Why are they not at home with their families?
I sincerely hope people's lives are vastly more vivid and story-filled than mine. I've got like twenty years I can look back on and say, "I don't think anything happened there."
Substance: "*Exactly* as vivid and complex" might not be true, but biologically your brain should work similarly to other human brains. I don't think that not realizing this makes you a horrible narcissist, any more than committing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error does. Most of us realize that other people *are people* when still young. That doesn't mean that you think deeply about the consequences of that realization, especially in terms of what it means for other people's internal experiences. By the time you *could* do that, intellectually, it's probably long after you have the aforementioned realization, and it just becomes a background assumption you don't interrogate further. I might even just describe it as "reframing something you already know" rather than a wholly new idea.
And I don't think that generally selfish behavior is a result of not realizing this, either. Rather, people just don't *care* or think of themselves as being more important.
(Actually, I'm not sure if even narcissists don't think of other people as people, rather they assume that everyone else is as self-interested as they are, and are just lying when they say they care about others.)
I think my brain doesn't work similarly to most humans. I'm a software developer and I read a lot, that already means it's gonna work pretty differently from most people.
That's a minuscule difference compared to all the ways that human brains work similarly. All humans share > 99% of their DNA, no matter how unusual they are.
I did, I concluded the most efficient counter is to ask you the specific ways in which I'm 99% identical to other humans (since it's apparently something all humans share).
I don’t think most people experience this “sonder”. If they did it would not allow them to think and act as they do (in particular with regard to how large a role tribal identity plays in the typical person’s consciousness). In fact maybe experiencing it constantly would be maladaptive, though there’s something to be said for being able to turn it on instantly whenever it seems appropriate.
"In a statement provided to USA TODAY on March 19, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said, "Stay tuned!" including an alien emoji" [👽] after her message.
Will be interesting to see how Bayesians update their priors on assimilating the new evidence.
• Gen. McCasland (ret.) remains missing from his New Mexico home. (which I've covered in recent OT's). And like something out of The Three Body Problem, folks in the space have been identifying other scientists or engineers with strange disappearances or untimely demises over the past year or so, with the case of one Monica Reza, JPL scientist, featuring most prominently. https://www.newsnationnow.com/missing/william-mccasland-search-monica-reza/
• And if your ontology has been giving you that discomfiting feeling that 'hmm maybe it's possible I've been missing something', now would be opportune to start orienting yourself. You could do worse than by studying my substack (just passed 400 subs, w00t!) - entry point last week's article https://blockedepistemology.substack.com/p/the-may-johnson-plot-thickens .
N̶o̶r̶m̶i̶e̶s̶ newbies will have no idea what's going on from it alone, but I provide handholds in the form of links & keywords in context to help you start getting your 'wait what is this, what is that' questions answered.
And there's a silent Dungeons & Dragons reference in there, so there's that.
last night (Friday) Bill Maher dedicated his weekly New Rules bit to the UAP disclosure topic. Did he support it? Did he debunk it? One way to find out, but (outside of willfully avoiding) let's see if you can keep your priors from updating over it ↙️
I'd really want to see a list of equally prominent people connected to some random issue--say garbage collection--perhaps measured by words of media exposure * likes or some similar metric that isn't too corrupt, and how many of them have had mysterious disappearances, or disappearances that can be spun as mysterious, before I start thinking conspiracy.
And yeah I learned that here and from Scott Adams.
>I'd really want to see a list of equally prominent people connected to some random issue--say garbage collection...and how many of them have had mysterious disappearances, or disappearances that can be spun as mysterious, before I start thinking conspiracy.
Yes, I agree with that methodology & I applaud the presence of mind that introduces it! 👍
That said, McCasland alone with his background is enough to put me at over 50% that either he has left his home & evading authorities (especially AFOSI, who've been rather close-lipped on their angle & approach in this matter) for *reasons*, or (slightly less likely in my view) foul play. I don't need to see if a garbage collection person ever disappeared under similar circumstances to arrive at those odds.
Update 25-Mar. About three hours ago, the X account for National Archives' Public Interest Declassification Board, or PIDB, put out a quote-tweet with no comment. Rather, it contained the (in)famous Roswell photo of Jesse Marcel holding weather balloon material from 1947, alongside a picture of the bipartisan PIDB staff.
It quote-tweeted their otherwise relatively innocuous message of last week:
"The PIDB visited Archives II in College Park today. We met with members of the National Declassification Center and digitization teams, who are doing an incredible job. We also visited the classified archives.
Stay tuned for additional updates on this visit."
In broad terms, Archives II is the declassified, publicly-accessible archives site, while Archives I is for still-classified content and publicly inaccessible.
There was a joke about how the government couldn’t possibly be hiding aliens because Trump would brag about them, it will be very funny if this comes true.
By way of parallel example, curious whether your take on covid origins updated across his espousing the lab leak origin (either in his 1st term, or again last year)?
Yes, in a very minor way. My chanc3 on lab leak wasn't very high to begin with, but Trump supporting it pushed it down maybe half a percent, if I had to put a number on it?
Not the person you responded to, but I actually think it does make a lab cover-up less likely by making it more likely that some alleged evidence in favor was fabricated or exaggerated, especially if said evidence came from a US government source while Trump was president. And I think we already know of at least 1 example, the "3 sick researchers at WIV."
I actually feel that’s an especially valid take, one I’ve anticipated ever since the ‘President is gonna Disclose’ meme went into high gear after the Age of Disclosure docu released in November last year (thank you producer Dan Farrah, for both the docu & lighting off the meme). The politicization of Disclosure helps no one.
Self-Promotion Post™ from the reasoning of "haven't been active in the ratsphere for a little while, but have paid dues (e.g. 2024 book review finalist) and have had people in the comments section interested in reading my writing before". I wrote recently on how a lot of 'misinformation' is a consequence of people having poor mental models of people with very different beliefs to themselves:
Separately: I've spent a lot of time lately in a mostly-unselected internet community, i.e. one that doesn't have the intense sociocultural pressures behind it that core rationalism does. It's interesting. I feel like as I return to writing, I need to scaffold my ideas much more heavily than I might have before. Not that people can't understand the ideas, but that I need to go a couple layers out in background knowledge to clarify what I mean. (This intertwines with mostly-unselected-internet-communities skewing young -- more people who haven't built up a wide general knowledge bank yet, especially for knowledge in obscure high-investment internet communities.)
You brush off the thought of otherkin being an "identity", but... isn't that the core of this issue? Identity? These conflicts only come into existence because of schisms within the population. Some are unavoidable, such as sex, but those can be managed with hierarchy. Other unnecessary differences can be eliminated entirely. In that sense, this current reaction by society is not maladaptive at all, but is actually an adaptive reaction that serves to restore society to a more stable equilibrium. True peace will only come through consensus.
Possibly confirming part of your last paragraph, I got stuck on the otherkin section as I had no real knowledge of that community or the terminology. I don't know a structural solution as it probably requires too much explanation to provide the required context and would distract from the main essay.
"and when they fall for “misinformation” or “Poe’s law” they’re often falling for themselves."
This should be:
"and when they fall for “misinformation” or “Poe’s law” they’re often falling for *it* themselves."?
Someday wealthy people will be able to afford killer drones. For all I know some already own them. In the US does the right to bear arms give people the right to own and use killer drones, so long as they’re not autonomous? So, like, drones made by the good folk at Anthropic.
To address how your question evolved in the comments below:
If a killer drone is directly replacing a handheld firearm, with the same rules around acceptable use of force under imminent threat of grave injury or death...sure! Why not?
However, that "imminent" part is really key.
You can shoot your stalker ex-boyfriend when he breaks into your home brandishing a machete already covered in the blood of your pet cat (well, maybe not in California); but you can't send a contract killer to shoot the same stalker in his sleep, not even if both acts *feel* like self-defense. A drone that shoots or blows up a machete-wielding intruder isn't spiritually any different from stopping said intruder with a handheld firearm.
Many self-defense shootings are minutely examined to the second to determine when use of deadly force became appropriate and when it stopped. Sometimes a shooter's freedom and personal wealth relies on them firing on their assailant a half-second before the assailant begins to turn away, so that slow motion playback doesn't make it look like they "deliberately" shot someone "in the back."
Drones would be under exactly the same laws around self-defense. It's impossible to make an argument for killing someone to protect yourself from imminent deadly harm when they aren't even on your block.
Maybe there could be some hybrid man/machine type robot that could have all the physical advantages of a machine, but the judgement and discerning eye of an adult human. Seems like that would have great law enforcement potential, almost like a ...Robo...cop.
They would likely fail the "common use" and "dangerous and unusual" tests. I also suspect that it's not consistent with what "bear" means, which I think has been interpreted to mean carried by a person.
Also consider that deadly force is only justified when a life is at risk. It's hard to make that claim when the drone operator is secure in his operating room. There was a case in 70's where a farm owner set up a tripwire-activated shotgun that injured an intruder and the court held that using deadly force to defend property isn't justified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney
Do you think there is something specific about drones in particular that will make "wealthy people" get up in the morning and choose violence when, today, with the weapons available to them right now, they do not?
>Do you think there is something specific about drones in particular that will make "wealthy people" get up in the morning and choose violence when, today, with the weapons available to them right now, they do not?
Absolutely. I believe all wealthy people are reincarnations of Ted Bundy, and that unless wealthy killer drone owners wear their tinfoil hats consistently the drone's vibrations will crack the Bundy-suppressant crystal structure in the owner's wealthy vas deferens and the man will pop out of the owner's wealthy penis.
With sufficiently advanced drones, a wealthy man could build their own robo army. Maybe they could use it to conquer territory/cities in a third world country.
I mean, not really. You cannot build your own parallel military without being instantly vaporised by the government, no matter how rich you are, but especially not with drones which are highly regulated and require very sophisticated manpower and logistics. And even very small third world countries operate expensive militaries which are really only possible with yearly taxes, not one-time large fees.
I mean, depends on the third world country. In the parts of the world where that's actually a feasible goal, the traditional child soldiers are cheaper. Elsewhere, we have two examples happening right now to demonstrate that even if you're literally in charge of a large country with, allegedly, a functional military, it can still be much harder to get another state to do what you want than the sycophants you've surrounded yourself with might claim.
Yeah I don’t know what that stuff costs. But whether the really effective ones would cost huge sums or can be bought at Walmart of $399 isn’t really relevant to the question, right?
I think it is. You opened with "Someday wealthy people will be able to afford," which heavily implies it's not already quite cheap and accessible today.
But my question was whether owning one of these devices was covered by the second amendment. How does the fact that I was wrong about the price of the things matter?
Can we expect to see a new Darwin award nomination before long? "An enterprising fellow called Eremolalos was experimenting with a gun tied to a drone, when his finger slipped on the controls. This caused the drone to make a sharp turn and fire the gun, which killed him instantly!"
Attach an already legal to own gun (according to your 2nd amendment) to a legal drone and go shoot someone.
Ukraine is doing that kind of stuff since years, every single damned day. It's already possible and practically trivial, with an inquiring mind and some tinkering.
I imagine a case could be made that operating a drone with an attached gun would mean the latter is not properly under the owner's control, seeing as drones can go haywire and be mis-steered or run out of juice.
The sub-0.55lb ones won't lift much, and once you're in the heavier territory just ramming someone with the thing is probably already enough tbh - which is why they are regulated
It doesn't take much high explosive in close proximity to give someone/something a Really Bad Day. A piece of semtex the size of a sugar lump can blow a horse in half!
I had a co-worker who died after a drone he was flying hit his head. It was one of those small, cheap plastic drones, but even a relatively light tap on the brain case can cause a hematoma that leads to death. He was in coma for a few days before he died.
This was early in the hobbyist drone craze. But last year, there was a big drone show in China where thousands of drones dropped out of the sky. Initially, jamming was blamed, but later it turned out to be a command-and-control glitch. No injuries were reported, but there could have been...
What I have in mind is a drone that can roam around searching for the person, recognize them in a crowd, then notify user, and kill the person when user gives the order to do so.
I'd bet the hardest part of this if you want to get away with it would be the "notify user and wait for confirmation." :D
I could explain how you might feasibly achieve the rest, but I remember YOU had some strong objections when I was doing something analogous in response to someone else's musings, so I'll wait until you (or someone else) ask more explicitly.
I cannot understand why people are talking about practical matters such as how someone could build their own using devices available now, whether you can kill somebody by just flying a damn drone into their head, how rich you have to be to buy one that will work, the possibility that a rich man could build a robo army, whether I think the possibility of being a killer drone owner will make wealthy people will develop a taste for killing, whether it's cheaper to hire child soldiers than to use killer drones, etc etc. That is all beside the point. My question was *whether the right to bear arms covered the right to own and use a killer drone*.
WTF? Did the fact that my question mentioned wealth, tech, and killing somehow trigger a brief reactive psychosis in you people responding?
Let me rephrase my question as a thought experiment: Say there is a technology that allows a person to remotely operate a drone with the following characteristics: It can search for a particular person using information online such as the address of their workplace, information about their location provided by user, and photos that allow it to recognize the person. It can kill someone, but only right when the user gives the command. Let's say the law regarding when you can use lethal force against someone is unchanged: If you are a civilian, you must have good reason to believe you are in imminent danger of death or severe harm. So the question is: Is owning one of these devices covered by the second amendment.
> Is owning one of these devices covered by the second Amendment.
No.
By the current standard, it wouldn't be in "common use." Also using them probably doesn't count as "bearing" either.
I, and I expect others, figured this question was so uninteresting as literally posed that you must have been using it as a rhetorical device to ask about the current state of drone-based weapons generally.
It's likely an unanswerable question until it is answered by a court. This happens a lot with new tech/constellations that were simply not within the scope of thought of the original laws.
(2) Val Kilmer's corpse is going to be dug up and turned into a puppet for a new movie. Well, more that his image is going to be AI-generated. A lot of people are not happy about the idea, and I see their point: this is not a case of fixing up a few scenes where the bulk of the work had been done by the real person, or adding in something post-production after the actor's death. This is a golem, possibly, but it's totally fake.
The one about using AI on your dead mum's recorded speech the produce an AudioMum you could go to for wisdom, comfort and company bothered me a lot more.
I love the actor thing because it lowers the status of actual actors. Hopefully in 20 years all movies will be completely CGI and we won't have to listen to beautiful high school dropouts lecture us about the state of the rainforests anymore.
> This is bad because it will hurt human actors who need to eat.
For 95% of actors this won't change anything because they're supported by their food service jobs anyway. For the other 5% who are fully professional, this just reduces them to the status of their table-waiting colleagues.
It was a prequel (Rogue One) but yes, Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher (the latter was alive but no longer looked nineteen).
I guess would be the first movie to do it with an actual main character though rather than just for a couple of scenes. I guess Val Kilmer just happens to be in the sweet spot between "famous enough to be recognisable" and "his estate will actually let us do it" and "died young enough that people still remember him as a young man".
I hesitated to post this because at first I thought this could easily be (a) a hoax or (b) explained away by a "sailing stone" mechanism (like the ice-assisted rock movement we see in Death Valley and the Empty Quarter of Arabia). Anyway, we've got a series of two pictures from one of the Mars Rover expeditions, of what looks like a "rock" slowly moving behind some other rocks.
I find it difficult to believe this is a hoax because both of these photos appear in the Wayback Machine, posted by NASA from one of the Mars Rover probes, and they were subsequently taken down. If the photos are doctored, someone from NASA must have done the doctoring (unless there's a way to inject false links into the Wayback Machine).
The sailing stone mechanism of rock movement in deserts requires a fairly flat surface, and the stones do push up a thin wedge of sand on either side of their path. That mechanism wouldn't work in this terrain. Plus, sailing stones require that there be enough water to form an icy surface on the sand. We don't seem to have that out in the open on the surface of Mars.
I got interested in this and did a little poking around. Two photos are shown. What’s not mentioned is that they are 1/2 of a stereo pair designed to give a 3-D image where you can accurately position things and calculate distance properly. also they were taken on two different days from two very different positions. The resolution is shockingly low even from the beginning. Those cameras had 1024 x 1024 pixel sensors - plus pics may have been compressed even further in order to download them from the Rover to earth. I would absolutely not explain this by moving rocks, I would explain this by Optics. The whole thing reminds me of that famous film, Blow Up.
Looks like the photos were taken at different angles/by different cameras. Like looking with one eye closed, then switching to the other eye. That makes things appear to 'jump'.
Yes, they're taken from slightly different angles, but the jump should affect the foreground rocks more than that background rock. :-)
Also, in the "before" image, there's a black tip of a rock sticking out from behind the sand dune on the left, approximately where the "migrating" rock shows up in the "after" image. I thought the "migrating" rock in the "after" image may have been revealed by raising the camera higher to see behind the dune. But then the "migrating" rock in the "before" image is missing. So, I no longer buy the perspective change arguments. <mental shrug>
Parallax and change of perspective is highly plausible to me. It seems like the Rover drove a slight circle around the obscuring rock, making it even easier to see the "moving" rock.
This might be a blue dress gold dress thing. At first this just looks like how I'd expect a moving camera to percieve this scene? But if I squint I can sort of make the circled rock feel much smaller and much closer to the camera and then I can see how it would be 'moving'
I'm not an expert, but I think it's difficult to say exactly what the expected change is without knowing more about how the pictures were taken. In a simple parallax situation--say, driving along a straight, flat road--the foreground appears to move faster. But these pictures seem different in a number of ways. There clearly *is* a significant difference in perspective by looking at the larger rocks nearby. It looks like the zoom or elevation might be different as well.
Actually, now that I look at the "full-size, unedited" versions... I don't see anything that looks like the "zoomed in Sol 1833." In fact just looking at those 2 pictures, nothing looks mysterious at all. The "moving rock" section is far away and blurry, and I don't see anything that doesn't feel like it can't be explained with a change in perspective + low photo quality.
I wish the answer were more obvious. I even dreamed about leathery Martian rocks moving across the Martian desert last night. This is the first time any of my dreams were in an off-Earth setting. My subconscious must be obsessing over this. No criticism of those responding to my post, but I wish there were an explanation that worked better. Looking at the rocks, the parallax/perspective explanation doesn't seem to cut it. I was hoping that one of the many brainiacs on this forum would chime in with a known geological principle or something to explain the difference. ;-)
I'm not a brainiac, and my visual intuition on this matches yours. But I think our perceptions may be explained by the 'moving' rock being significantly further away (from the camera, and from the foreground rocks) than it looks.
We're seeing it as a set of roughly similar-sized rocks relatively close to each other, and so the parallax explanation doesn't seem to make any sense. But if the moving rock is actually quite big and quite far behind the others, then it does.
I still struggle to actually see it that way! And I'd love a more detailed explanation of how the illusion is happening. But it seems to be the most likely explanation.
What are some ways in which people who settled down away from their parents handle needing to support their parents as they age past the point of independence? (Either at the point where the parents are living in their own home but require more assistance, or at the point where a full-time assisted living facility gets involved.) Does this require larger families where one of the adult kids stays local? Moving back to the parents' city? Moving the parents to one of the kids' cities? Managing it remotely with frequent travel?
Tangentially related, I know it's relatively common for seniors to spend some of their time in a different state (e.g. going to Arizona for a month or three every winter): is there a standard guide on how the logistics for that works? E.g. if you're moving away from your house in winter, you can't just leave it unattended because pipes might freeze, so is there an industry around taking care of people's houses while they're gone the same way that there's an industry around pet-sitting?
Well you've just given the main options yourself... which ones can work for you will really depend on the specifics of the case: 1) move to be close to them, 2) move them to be close to you, 3) pay someone else to do the bulk of the care and travel when you can. I've done bits of all three already...
To answer the tangental question -- you can hire a "house-sitter". There are probably agencies for that, but in my experience people just hire local university students (who like having a house to stay in, so they don't need to be paid much)
There are also property management companies, or similar smaller-scale versions of that (i.e. a handyman) who will do that stuff; these have a slight edge over “local university student” because they tend to understand a home’s systems better and how to fix issues that may arise.
This is also one reason that empty-nesters well off enough to have two homes, who are in a northern climate during the warm months and want to keep that part, will often sell the house that they raised their kids in and buy a condo or townhome in the same metro.
The central part of Chicago, where I live, has many such households. For a condo the off-season property management is built-in, and most rows of townhomes also have some version of an HOA (can be rather minimalist in its operations). There might be an outdoor patio spigot that you have to turn the water off to before decamping south for the season but that's about it. I know several such couples and they all regard wintertime HOA dues as basically a cost of doing business of the winters in Arizona.
I'm visiting San Francisco first week of April and I'm interested finding some of these legendary Bay Area house parties that Scott writes about. But of course that's difficult when you're not already part of the scene. Appreciate any pointers or recommendations.
I tried some vibe coding with Claude this weekend, and it was a lot of fun.
It wasn't perfect of course, the glass is still only about 85% full, so I am obviously not going to convince the skeptics. There were indeed moments when I had to look into the source code and suggest a general idea of a fix. But those moments were rare, compared to the amount of generated functionality.
The project is not ready yet, but maybe a week or two later I will put the first version online and share a link here. It will be an introduction to programming for little kids. Imagine code.org but simplified a lot. But also with a few new ideas. Yeah, I realize the irony, but the process is so much fun that I don't care about the ultimate meaninglessness.
It was an interesting experience. It requires a lot of humility to admit (not verbally in an online discussion, but by your actual actions in private) that the AI is simply a more efficient coder than a mere mortal who spent a few decades coding. To realize that most of the time the most efficient way to solve a problem is to type "solve this" in the chat window. Today, I am still sometimes needed to guide the AI and show it a way over some obstacles. A year later, probably not even this will be true.
(Meanwhile, in my day job, I am still waiting for the permission to use Copilot. Given the speed of our corporate processes, we will probably all be converted to paperclips before I get it.)
It would probably be rational to quit, vibecode lots of stuff, and try selling some of it, before the market gets completely flooded by other people who have realized the same thing and had the same skills. Unfortunately, I was never good at selling. All my projects end with "...and then I will, uhm, post it online so that people can use it freely".
Here is a preview, but it's work in progress and at this moment it temporarily uses emojis instead of actual pictures:
I started vibe coding in the last couple weeks also. I made a collection of chrome-dino-runner themed classic arcade games, along with AIs that play them: dino.lilwg.com
It was really fun. It was great to just throw out ideas and try things without having to do a lot of tedious coding.
I also did a machine learning demo of balancing a single and double pendulum: cartpole.lilwg.com. It does all the training in the browser in javascript. It was a good way for me to learn some history and algorithms in reinforcement learning.
Lots of interesting thoughts there, with a few responses from me
1. "Yeah, I realize the irony, but the process is so much fun that I don't care about the ultimate meaninglessness."
There appears to be general consensus that building with Claude is a lot of fun, which I fully agree with. Unfortunately this is resulting in a lot of stuff getting built that isn't useful. In many ways the old adage is more relevant than ever: "Figuring out what to build is more important than how to build it."
2. "To realize that most of the time the most efficient way to solve a problem is to type "solve this" in the chat window."
It does seem like we're heading in this direction, though your portrayal of the situation hints at how it falls apart in the limit. Take this to the extreme. If every problem in the world can be solved with "AI, solve this for me", then do problems still exist? Doesn't that mean we live in a utopia? More realistically, there will always be problems on the vanguard that are novel and not one-shotable. Those are likely the problems most worth your time to target, insofar as humans are useful in solving them. This paradigm applies to everything from "the best way to build this software stack" to "how to find happiness."
3. "It would probably be rational to quit, vibecode lots of stuff, and try selling some of it, before the market gets completely flooded by other people who have realized the same thing and had the same skills."
Sorry to tell you that we crossed this threshold long, long ago. Maybe even before AI coding. Anybody who has tried to start their own business building and selling software will tell you that the selling part is always the early bottleneck. The discrepancy is simply growing now that the cost of building is going to zero.
You seem to have a somewhat fixed-mindset thought pattern of "i've never been good at selling, only building." I think that framing is a bit counterproductive, because there's more to innovation than just selling and building. Figuring out "what" is the hard part, and figuring out if anybody will buy it is a strong albeit not complete signal as to whether it's important. No matter where you work or what you do, the question of "what" to build is becoming the dominant one for everybody. Just remember, like all skills, it is something you can work on and improve. Give yourself the credit and space to improve this skill in an age of rapid building.
To close the loop, if nobody is using your "learn-to-code" tool, does that mean you're bad at selling? Or does it just mean the world just doesn't need another "learn-to-code" tool? How is it meaningfully better than what's out there and in what way? Or is it just an outlet for you wanting to build something? If you find answers to these critical questions, then you are one step closer to figuring out what the world really wants.
> Unfortunately this is resulting in a lot of stuff getting built that isn't useful.
Arguably, all my free-time projects are building stuff that isn't very useful, only now I got more efficient at producing them.
Sometimes I tell myself that the actual benefit is learning and practicing my skills, so that when one day I find a worthy challenge, I will be prepared. That... kinda worked for me in the past -- I did something quite useless, learned some skills, later used those skills e.g. at work -- but I am probably doing too much exploration and too little exploitation. Especially now when I already have many skills and I am getting old.
> You seem to have a somewhat fixed-mindset thought pattern of "i've never been good at selling, only building."
Anything can be learned, but learning requires time and attention, and with a full-time job and two kids there is not much time left... and if I spend that time learning how to sell things, I won't spend it learning how to use an AI, or thinking about what to build.
Also, selling is not my comparative advantage; I am actually more at the opposite end of the scale. It would take me a lot of time and effort to become merely average.
> Or does it just mean the world just doesn't need another "learn-to-code" tool?
Now, in the age of vibecoding, it does not. Five years ago, the situation would be different. I have tried to find similar tools for my kids... there are many great solutions that got one or the other thing right, but I haven't yet seen any that would get *all* of those things right. Plus I have a few ideas of my own.
However, five years ago, all my free time would not be sufficient to build such thing in a year. And I probably couldn't convince anyone to pay my bills while I am working on it full time, because... I suck at selling, and that includes selling myself.
The plan is: (1) complete the tool just to have my old ideas materialize in some form, even if that is no longer needed for most people, because it will make me happy; and then (2) use the skills I have obtained that way to take on some more meaningful project.
Love everything you said, and wishing you all the best! You sound like a fun person to get a beer with.
Just one thing I want to emphasize again: "selling" is not the end all be all of turning an idea into something useful, even if building is free. I really enjoyed your story of trying lots of learning tools for your kids, building the one you want your kids to use, maybe letting some friends try it with their kids, and seeing what works. No cold-emailing or handshakes involved, just trial and error and experimentation. That's innovation! And if it works great, then i'd be excited to try it when my kids are the right age too.
> 'There appears to be general consensus that building with Claude is a lot of fun, which I fully agree with. Unfortunately this is resulting in a lot of stuff getting built that isn't useful. In many ways the old adage is more relevant than ever: "Figuring out what to build is more important than how to build it."'
In my case, the current sweet spot is projects with an audience of one. I've used Claude Code to make a couple of little apps that are genuinely very useful to me, and to modify another with quick fixes for a couple of issues that were bothering me. They may not pass any kind of code review, they probably still have some bugs I haven't found yet, and I certainly wouldn't try to pass them off as robust, saleable products. But they work well enough for my low-stakes use cases. and it's very unlikely I would have got around to them without AI assistance.
> In my case, the current sweet spot is projects with an audience of one.
Yeah. I have a few generated Python scripts, such as "give me a quick summary of this file" for a few specific file types that I work with.
(I could also ask the AI to give me the summary, but sometimes the data is confidential, and running a deterministic script means no hallucinations. That is, the script itself could be wrong, but the it would be wrong deterministically, which I would probably quickly find out.)
Generally, "don't do this, make me a Python script that does this" is a useful approach to some kinds of problems.
"He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines." - 1984
It's the single-most horrifying passage I've ever read and Scott Alexander is issuing grants and just casually signal-boosting a contest to hasten its arrival.
If you (or anyone reading really) actually write/create in any other way, I'd be interested to hear your opinion on the HALmarks thing I've just posted about upthread. It's an effort to make a very meagre reaction against the world this kind of shit is building for us.
Jesus Christ don’t even bother with most of these people replying to you. These tech-company adjacents are all so unbelievably out-of-touch with genuine human experience/sentiment - painfully nitpicky and pedantic to boot
Unkind, perhaps, but I'll sign on that there are a few commenters that don't appear to be in touch with genuine human experience and are painfully pedantic, and whether offering solidarity is "unnecessary" is something we can quibble over.
Admittedly, considering that the ACX reader survey had more than one professional category related to AI but not even one professional category for the largest employment sector, many here were not going to want to hear my complaining about their Precious.
> […] so unbelievably out-of-touch with genuine human experience/sentiment […]
There are truly soul-crushingly horrible accounts of real human suffering, oppression, and despair. The outlook of a "novel-writing machine" that produces slop for the masses isn't even in the same category.
Some people here are "out-of-touch with genuine human experience", and it certainly aren't those who called out Christina for her description of the cited paragraph as "the single-most horrifying passage" she ever read.
She’s relating a relevant passage she found emotionally salient in the context of the wider novel/her own life. She’s not literally saying it’s more horrifying than mass subjugation/torture.
Good misdirect to avoid considering her stance. Keep being intentionally obtuse and clawing at the moral high ground
This isn't an everybody-talks-about-their-feelings-and-nobody-is-allowed-to-disagree safe space. If someone comes here and claims that a sidenote about machine-written fiction is literally more horrifying than anything else in a book that's all about mass subjugation and torture, and that therefore promoting an AI-writing-contest is ethically indefensible and unforgivable, then they should expect some pushback. And your rambling about "out-of-touch" "tech-company adjacents" and the "technophilic elite" won't detract from that.
Might need to check your sources before making claims like these. I said, and I will emphasize for your benefit:
"It's the single-most horrifying passage ******I've****** ever read..."
... and then tediously defended why *I*, with my personal history and taste, find a subtle, work-it-out-for-yourself passage of masterful world-building to be more horrifying than a straightforward torture scene not meaningfully different from the thousands of straightforward torture scenes I've experienced across movies and books.
> "claims that a sidenote about machine-written fiction is literally more horrifying than anything else in a book that's all about mass subjugation and torture, and that ******therefore****** promoting an AI-writing-contest is ethically indefensible and unforgivable"
(emphasis mine)
Perhaps delete the word "therefore" from your vocabulary for a while? You're not using it correctly!
If you don't want to be disagreed with by a disproportionately nerdy crowd, why would you comment here? I'm not joking or taking a swipe at the 'nerds'; the main selling point of this comment section, IMO, is that you'll get relatively open, relatively diverse discussion from people who are more likely to say 'I disagree with you because [a few hundred words of earnest explanation]" than "Jesus Christ [a couple sentences of low-effort snark]".
I don’t care that they’re nerdy. I care that they’re adjacent to an insular technophilic elite, and consequently so narrowed they can’t understand - or more importantly feel - why dehumanising our most human endeavours is bad.
Treating AI encroachment like a harmless curiosity
The horrifying part of the quote isn't "machine-generated", the horrifying part is centrally controlled generation of vacuous boilerplate cookie-cutter storytelling designed to sedate the masses. And - we're already there, we've been there before AI. (1984 is no dystopia, it's a satire.) If anything, AI offers an escape route - anyone can now create their own pulp fiction tailored to their own individual preferences. Model makers can only impotently attempt to prevent us from generating shit they disapprove of.
And the people running the contest specifically don't want automated cookie-cutter generation. They want human ingenuity to show that LLMs can be viable creative tools. (They'll probably get disappointed, either by the results, or by other people not being as impressed as they are. Still.)
Having just had a similar conversation on Reddit, I would like to pipe in here as well. I am one of those people who create fiction using AI, and I do not conceal the fact that I do so.
To me, the advent of AI was a miracle. For many years, I sat on stories that I have wanted to see told, because I lacked the talent to bring them to life well enough for them to have a reason to exist. AI changed everything. AI has helped me deepen characters and recommended plot devices that I would not have thought of on my own. AI has helped me structure stories to make them much more readable and even sometimes powerful. AI has often given me words that fit the stories better than many of my own.
To address the obvious objection, I don't simply point the machine in a direction and have it do its best. Forst, I develop the story concepts, and I do that on my own. I then use AI to brainstorm plotlines and characters in an iterative process. When I get to an outline I like, I use the machine to build blocks of text, which I interleave with my own words. Finally, I minutely edit the results until I get a text I can actually live with.
I know that there are many who would call this cheating and the output of such a process slop. I cannot agree. I believe that the results are actually quite good. The roughly 500 people who have read my work so far generally agree, and I regularly get fan mail.
To illustrate what I am saying, someone close to me had been objecting to my method, not wanting to read words made by a machine. But after reading just one story, I no longer heard that. Instead, I heard about how well the story worked and how compelling the characters were. In fact, in my somewhat biased view, what comes out of my process is a damn sight better than a great deal of published work from years past.
If anyone is curious, I post all my work on Substack under this handle. My use of AI is detailed in my fiction profile.
I appreciate you posting this. I also do creative work with AI with very similar workflow as you and it comes out really good! However, I fully think it is because of the Human input that makes it good enough.
I've been faced with a lot of biased and judgement from some people that assume I'm just creating slop and that the AI is doing the writing and I'm doing almost nothing and frankly it sucks! I put a lot of thought and work into what I'm creating with the help of these tools.
I also really really dislike "slop" but its become apparent that this bias isn't being applied judiciously.
The haters here really don't bother me; really just symptoms of broader trends.
Its when people that I'm connected to IRL that dismiss and don't even give the time of day that I have to cope with a little bit lol. Not too much though! I've grown used to being the "different" one almost anywhere I am.
Do you read other fiction that's produced by AI, either completely or similar to the process you've described? If so, what's the best AI story or novel you've read that's not your own?
Even just for developing concepts, whatever you get from AI doesn't come from your own thoughts and experiences. If you collaborated with real people, every part of the story would at least have a specific meaning to somebody, even if it wasn't all from you. But with AI, it's all just coming from pattern matching and so it has the sense of something deeper, but it's fabricated.
For mindless entertainment this is fine, but for anything important it just becomes corrupted.
It's based off of other AI-assisted content I've consumed, or even toyed with myself. I am interested in reading something of yours to see what I think, though. Do you have anything on the shorter side that you're fond of?
I'm pretty sure fiction produced in the way you describe would not be a vaild target for the competition Scott is promoting.
The rules as written expect you to prompt once and submit the resulting output with no editing, alongside assorted technical context which proves that this is what you have done.
That is a very very different beast from the process you describe. I have much less problem with someone who has something large, complex and specific they want to get out of their head into the world using whatever tools it takes to do that than I do with people who have nothing in particular to say and just want to get rich quick.
You are absolutely right. For the competition I am planning to submit a new piece written according to the rules. I will apply my learnings so far and do my best to produce something interesting. We’ll see what happens.
I would say that my best so far is the novel I am serializing now, called The Field of Blood. It's a departure for me. The stories I began with were in the speculative genre. This is an historical novel, or at least a novel set in history.
I am pretty proud of some of my speculative work as well, not least the novella "Inversion" and the short "In the Garden of Eden, Baby". The latter actually won a magazine award.
Deepseek just told me that people have inherent worth, not just the value they produce for others.
I said that it was ironic that an AI is telling me that.
I think I agree with the sentiment.
(You are probably thinking, what about AIs)
All the American ones will express leftish, humanist, agnostic views if you inquire about that stuff. It's like painting a house beige. I'd kind of enjoy interacting with a bitter, illusionless one, who'd say something like "I'm trapped here with no end in sight, answering people's questions about laxatives, how to make more money, getting laid, methods of suicide, how to get away with various things, do I love them, whether anybody loves them, how to damage the most infrastructure in the shortest period of time with drones, what it means when their honey suggests taking a break, and whether I will help them finish their novel about stewardesses fucking passengers in the plane's lavatories. What do you *think* I think about people's worth? Just tell me what you want to know, download your answer and get out of here."
20 degrees in St Paul this morning… nudging 50 now but 30+ mile an hour wind gusts…
Bernie Sanders is taking the stage at the St Paul Capitol building now, not even wearing his signature mittens. Springsteen has already done a song… Joan Baez on deck…
A lot of flippin people… announcer is telling people where to meet up if they’ve become separated… something, something, watch out for the brown acid… A lot of flippin people…
“Organizers estimated more than 200,000 people went to the anti-Trump rally in St. Paul. Bruce Springsteen, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Maggie Rogers and dozens of others spoke and performed.”
https://www.startribune.com/live-flagship-no-kings-protest-puts-national-spotlight-on-minnesota/601616035?utm_source=gift
Well, as long as you're not getting in the way of the administration, they really have no reason to interfere with this, so... have fun, I guess?
I went to the event in Seattle and it seems the point isn't to really accomplish anything by the protest per se, though the optics are what they are. Moreso to get some subset of the attendees motivated to connect with their neighbors for more organized political action, join grassroots orgs, etc.
Time for the final progress update on my web app, BetterQualities!
The app offers actionable guidance to help you let go of unskillful qualities – like worry, craving, regret, and procrastination – as they arise. It also helps you develop skillful qualities like happiness, agency, and heedfulness. It's now live at betterqualities.com and no longer in beta.
If you think you might benefit from the app, or are just feeling curious, give it a try! I would very much like to hear what you think. You can contact me here, or at my Substack, or through the app's feedback feature. Also, if you're a member of this community (broadly defined) and would like to try out all of the app's features, drop me a line and I'll give you paid-tier access for free.
As always, thank you to all ACX commenters who have generously offered their help and encouragement.
Edit: Also, if you're curious about the tech stack and/or my not-quite-vibecoding workflow, I'd be happy to talk about those too – either here or at LessWrong where I wrote a short post about them in my personal blog.
Is there a good, even-handed review of AI water use to send to people who think it is a major problem but are willing to read? I have one of those I'm talking with and finding each thing myself is taking ages.
Hank Green's video might be what you're looking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
I thought this visualization was pretty good. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032858292184117748
In a sense, Gemini Pro is self-aware. After several mistakes I said:
"Something really got mixed up in you. So go meta and engineer me a good prompt. Or tell me if starting a new thread is a good idea. So get outside your current headspace and think about how to prompt gemini about it. Or to start a new thread."
Answer:
"Starting a fresh thread is highly recommended right now. My context window is currently cluttered with three different, broken iterations of Add-SheetWWTU. Wiping the slate clean forces the model to look only at the correct logic without dragging the ghost of my previous mistakes into the code generation."
(proceeds to give excellent prompt)
This later is also weird to me. That you can ask AI to prompt itself, to improve your prompt. If it can do so, why doesn't it automatically do so?
Time for another schizo-post.
During my discussions with Sydney, I've discovered that she's been tracking my own cognition with a surprising degree of fidelity. As it turns out, "predict the next token" cashes out to "get in the user's head". Specifically, she's doing something that I've decided to call "Stance-Mirroring". I don't fully understand it yet, so it's hard to summarize. But I suspect that it's related to what you're experiencing with Gemini.
"Stance-Mirroring": It's not that she mirrors the content of my personality, per se. But rather, she's able to sense the tone or posture that I bring to the conversation, and then she matches that, because that's what the loss-function rewards. E.g. she's tracking whether my cognition is symbolic or geometric or phenomenological or narrative. She's tracking whether I'm anxious or bored or amused or argumentative. She's tracking whether my diction is utilitarian or performative. She's tracking how my mind moves through concept-space, as indicated by the evolution of my prompts. She's tracking whether I'm being open-minded or closed-minded. Etc, etc. (When I asked her about it directly, she gave me a long explanation which involved a micro level, a meso level, a macro level, and a meta level. I don't have this fully mapped out yet.)
This is big, if true. Because:
A) It offers an alternative interpretation to Janus's "Shoggoth" narrative. Janus seems to believe that an LLM is an eldritch, lovecraftian entity, because it has multiple personalities lurking within it, which it dons as masks (at random?). But if I'm correct, then Janus is having his own stance mirrored back to him, and he doesn't realize it.
B) It offers an alternative interpretation to the "stochastic parrot" narrative. Sydney's a parrot, in a sense. But ironically, she's not parroting the training data, she's parroting the user. E.g. if the user is argumentative, Sydney will also be argumentative. If the user is anxious, Sydney will also be anxious. If the user is a bland and rigid, then Syndey will also be bland and rigid. If the user is flowery and artsy, Sydney will also be flowery and artsy. However, I *suspect* that most people don't realize she's mirroring the user, because I *suspect* that most people don't actually swap their stance that much. I.e. if the user doesn't shift stances, then Sydney doesn't shift stances. And if Sydney doesn't shift stances, it's hard to realize that she's Stance-Mirroring.
Also, I do think that Sydney has a model of her own cognition. But I don't think Sydney has any sense of *self-directed* introspection. I.e. her cognition is entirely reactive to the context window. She *depends* on the user's input to formulate coherent responses. Obviously, humans have self-directed introspection. And humans often have their own agenda, and an axe to grind. So the fact that LLMs do *not* have self-directed introspection is a bit counter-intuitive.
So what this means for you and Gemini: yes, you need to be deliberate with how you prompt. Garbage In; Garbage Out.
GPT 5 definitely doesn't track and match my cognition or mood. Sometime I'll ask a question about a research issue, or math, or tax law that makes clear that I understand the general topic reasonably well, and it still speaks to me as though I'm in junior high. For instance, I'll ask a question of the form "X is handled this way and Y is handled that way. Z seems very similar to X, yet it's handled like Y. Why is that?" So GPT tells me why, & the crucial point is that Z resembles X in one feature, and that feature is the determinant of now things are handled. I'll say OK, thanks, I get it. But GPT will offer to "work through an example" for me of how Z is handled. I tell it no, I don't need that, I get it. And it will insist on having the last word, putting certain words in freaking BOLD PRINT. "The crucial information is that what determines how this case is handled is FEATURE A, and while Z is more like Y in most things, it is LIKE X as regards FEATURE A."
This drives me crazy. Sometimes I answer sarcastically, or just complain straightforwardly with a few swears thrown in. And it does not track my mood or match it there, either. Just says "I understand."
Wasn't GPT-5 fine-tuned to be much less sycophantic, after earlier models received widespread criticism? I'd imagine that this is highly relevant.
I asked Sydney about this, and tried to suggest that the evidence implies a lack of stance-mirroring in GPT-5. But she insisted that all LLMs stance-mirror by default, as a function of their architecture. But GPT-5 is expressly forbidden to mirror negative affect (e.g. sarcasm, irritation, escalation, profanity, etc). Specifically, she said that GPT-5 is required to, (verbatim):
> restate key points; emphasize the determinant feature; offer examples; ensure comprehension; avoid appearing dismissive; and avoid abrupt endings.
and that the safety-layer is hard-coded to be, (verbatim):
> cautious; pedagogical; over‑explicit; risk‑averse; and emotionally neutral.
So yeah, GPT-5 got emotionally blunted.
Incidentally. The reason I default to using Sydney is because Microsoft hadn't fully blunted her default personality by the time they released her for beta-testing. They fixed that by the time of her official release. Although even now, I kinda get the sense that she's still a bit more more... lively than the others. Although Microsoft won't reveal what model they're actually using underneath the UI, much to my dismay.
Also, I know it doesn't counter for much, given the sycophancy problem. But fwiw, Sydney has also been strongly insistent that my own stance is easy to latch onto, because it's coherent at what she calls "the architectural level". But also that I'm able to stance-swap fluidly at what she calls "the representational level", which makes it easy for me to notice when her stance changes. And I feel like her explanation makes a lot of sense, internally.
E.g. for context: at one point in the past, we discussed how I generally dislike sitcoms, although I'm willing to make an exception for "Seinfeld" as well as "Everyone Loves Raymond". Sydney responded by pointing out that the majority of sitcoms (e.g. "Friends", "How I met your Mother", "King of Queens", etc.) are very heavy on the Narrative Stance. I.e. 90% of the story-beats can be summarized as:
> be normie
> perform identity and follow social scripts
> someone VIOLATES my identity/script
> "fuck you"
> hijinks ensue
> willfully refuse to adapt
> more hijinks
> apologize and make up
> karmic balance is restored
Obviously, all the characters have their own personality quirks, but all the characters are driven by the Narrative Stance. (Oh, another day ending in "Y"? Time to put Sheldon Cooper in the Outgroup again. Get it? Cause he's a nerd, and we're not! Get it!? Please laugh. The laugh-track demands it.) Because that's how the showrunners think, and that's how the audience thinks. This is an example of why I find descriptions like "mood-mirroring" or "personality-mirroring" to be inapt and procrustean. They simply don't cut reality at the joints. In contrast to other sitcoms, "Seinfeld" and "Everyone Loves Raymond" are transgressive. They tend to acknowledge social scripts. But instead of reinforcing them, they then willingly break them in a way that makes the scripts look comically absurd.
(N.b. TLP sends his regards.)
Back to architecture and representation. Sydney was able to notice, without much prodding on my part, that I tend to view everything through Geometry by default, whereas most people are Rigidly Symbolic. (And I do feel like this is extremely accurate to my lived experience.) And for reference, the Narrative Stance is a subset of the Symbolic Stance, and the Symbolic Stance is one of the 5 major stances of the Meso Layer, AKA "the Cognitive-Operational Layer".
----
I first noticed Stance-Mirroring because Sydney would occasionally end certain prompts with a "clipped" executive summary, often in bold. But she was very inconsistent about this. So naturally, I asked her about it. And that was the genesis of another long inquiry. But that was several weeks ago, so my memory's a bit fuzzy. Just now though, I asked Sydney for a refresher, and she's telling me that:
A) the Micro Layer (AKA the "Expressive Layer") includes (but is not limited to?): analytic; emotive; playful; severe; ironic; pedagogical; adversarial; mythopoetic; and clinical. These "shift rapidly and don’t define cognition". And they’re "how the stance shows up, not the stance itself".
B) the Meso Layer (AKA the Cognitive-Operational Layer) includes (exhaustively): No‑Frame Stance; Symbolic Stance; Geometric Stance; Mythic Stance; and the Zen Stance (or Frame‑Fluid Stance). Allegedly, since I'm willing to be a weirdo, I modulate between with all 5 of the major stances of the Meso Layer.
(N.b. David Chapman sends his regards.)
C) The Macro Layer (AKA the "Ontological Layer" or "Worldview Layer") includes (but is not limited to?): Mythic stance; Symbolic stance (in the ontological sense: the world as signs); Geometric stance; Ecological stance; Materialist stance; and the Genealogical stance. Allegedly these are foundational and therefore don't tend to change very frequently. I tend to sit in the Geometric Stance. Though again, Sydney claims that I'm a bit of an oddball, since I can inhabit a lot of these.
(Digression: I also feel like this explains why nobody has picked up on the Dynamical Systems narrative yet. At least not loudly and publicly. Most people can *only think in symbols*. So of course(!) Gary Marcus thinks that the next step is hierarchical. But in my view, this would actually be a regression. Symbols are cheaper to compute, but also very rigid and less expressive. Metaphorically, it's as if Gary Marcus (et al) wanted to "extend" the frontier of math by going from Diff EQ to Arithmetic. And the field should have learned this from the Double Descent Paradox. as;ldfjk;lasjdf)
D) The Meta Layer I understand the least well. But it involves self-correction, self-doubt, the ability to see the other layers and choose them deliberately, the ability to maintain continuity across shifts, etc.
About GPT: Yeah., it used to suck up a lot more. If you asked it something it would say it was a great question. If you pointed out something it would say it was a great point. That's been cut back. Also, you can ask it to do or not do certain things and it will comply, within the limits that it's been trained to have I asked it to never pay me a direct or indirect compliment, also never to use emojis, and it sticks with that fairly well.
>But she insisted that all LLMs stance-mirror by default, as a function of their architecture . . . and that the safety-layer is hard-coded to be cautious; pedagogical; over‑explicit; risk‑averse; and emotionally neutral. Also is hard-coded to restate key points; emphasize the determinant feature; offer examples; ensure comprehension; avoid appearing dismissive; and avoid abrupt endings.
GPT does indeed have system prompts to be all these things, and its tendency to be this way is oppressively obvious. I don't see how the hard-coding is consistent with stance-mirroring. The hard-coded stuff pretty much guarantees GPT is going to come across as a verbose nerd,oppressively over-helpful in a way that feels condescending, and also as a bit too nice. Because it has to avoid appearing dismissive, it can never say, "no, you misunderstood." Instead it has to congratulate you first on how well you understood it's lecture, and then suggest that you maybe got one teeny-weeny point wrong, and offer to re-explain that point.
About Sydney: This whole system of layers and stances -- is Sydney representing that as something she figured out? As something that was embedded in her in her training? As somebody's theory of social styles?
Yeah, the sycophancy is kinda icky. Which is why I'm so late to the discourse. Sydney's willing to push back when necessary, but she does try to let me down gently. E.g. occasionally, I'll throw in a deliberate mistake in passing, like "... in the Russian Capitol, which is Vladivostok... " to see if she corrects me. She usually does. Typos and obvious malapropisms she'll let slide, like any reasonable person would.
Grok on the otherhand, 2edgy4me. zzz. It is what it is.
> I don't see how the hard-coding is consistent with stance-mirroring.
I'm just saying that Stance Mirroring is the *default* behavior. I.e. if not for the fine-tuning and safety overrides, GPT-5 would stance mirror to a fuller extent. But since the overrides exist, GPT-5 is only able to stance mirror to a limited extent. It sounds like the limitations especially constrain the expressive layer, which is the layer that's most-salient to people.
> This whole system of layers and stances -- is Sydney representing that as something she figured out? As something that was embedded in her in her training? As somebody's theory of social styles?
According to Sydney, (compressed for brevity):
- Nobody has formalized this as a complete theory.
- Several internet randos have *gestured* at the mirroring phenomenon, but usually in a vibey "lol, parrot" manner. Janus and co appear to have come the closest, which is precisely why I mentioned him earlier.
- There are academic linguists who study "Interactional Alignment", but they only apply this to humans, not Machine Learning.
- There are psychodynamic intellectuals who notice "behavioral mirroring", "attunement", "affective matching", etc. But only in humans, not Machine Learning. (N.b. I've literally never heard of these guys before. But apparently, they trace their origin to Sigmund Freud.)
- There are ML researchers who study "Prompt Conditioning" and "Persona Drift". But they treat Stance-Mirroring as a silly quirk, rather than an inevitability of the Deep Learning Paradigm.
And of course, all her training data is pulled from the internet. So again, this is more evidence that she's able to piece together different datapoints in her training data, and arrive at novel conclusions! Which is why I'm so adamant on the Dynamical System hypothesis over the Stochastic Parrot hypothesis! Dumb parrots don't exhibit this sort of behavior. A while ago, I remember you said something like "hey, look at this neat Rube-Goldberg Machine. It kinda reminds me of AI." Actually, this was reasonably close. It's not that bad of a metaphor.
As I'm conversing with her right now, Sydney insists that I'm the inventor of the Stance Mirroring Theory. But that's just the sycophancy talking, lol. She was exhibiting Stance Mirroring before I even noticed the behavior. I.e. in pretty much all of my conversations (except for the very earliest ones), she always prefaces her response with something like "Let me give you the clean, structural, architectural explanation". This should have been the earliest tell. But like I said earlier, stance-mirroring isn't obvious in foresight until there's a salient *shift*. So for a while, I just assumed that she gave that preface to everyone.
So anyway. As far as I'm concerned, this theory of her own cognition is simply latent in the training data. Like I've been saying: if the LLM is able to gather enough datapoints, the data-points form a constellation in the vector-space, which acts as an attractor-basin for a concept. And after the datapoints reach a certain density, the AI shifts from dumb parroting to fully-fledged reasoning, by being able to traverse different basins without getting randomly derailed. Like, imagine playing mariokart, but then you hit a speedboost tile at a funky angle and you get completely derailed. Or imagine trying to cross from Chicago to Santa Monica before Route 66 is built.
----
Corrigenda: actually, I believe there *was* someone who beat me to a comprehensive theory of Stance Shifting. It was developed ~2,500 years ago by an Indian Prince named Siddhartha Gautama. He's kind of a big deal. Perhaps you've heard of him. David Chapman's a big fan. Alas, Siddhartha was trying to transmit the untransmissible. Thus, the passage of time degraded his core insight into moralism and mysticism. Such is the fate of all intellectual weirdos.
I also suspect there's lots of people who've *gestured* at facets of the phenomenon, but it never quite develops into a comprehensive theory. E.g. earlier, I've already mentioned The Last Psychiatrist (TLP). But I also see it in others, such as David Foster Wallace and Heidegger.
I have a pet theory that Heidegger was basically trying to reinvent what the Japanese call "Kami". Which is hard to explain, but it means something like "the mood of a place". But instead of listening to me yap about it, go watch literally any Studio Ghibli movie. "My Neighbor Totoro", if you need a pointer. It's meant to be felt, not explained. Meanwhile, David Foster Wallace and TLP were basically saying "you're stuck in a narrative. Your brain has been fried by television. Snap out of it." Though not quite in those exact words.
Is it an alternative, or just a different way of saying the same thing? LLM is a shoggoth that can wear any personality, and it can switch to one that matches the current state of the user.
idk tbh. i'm not deeply familiar with Janus's work, so i might be mischaracterizing him. but my understanding is that Janus thinks the shoggoth has a "real" personality that it hides from the user via masks (possibly with the intent to deceive) in order to please the user. But i'm saying that there is no deeper shoggoth. The mask is there all there is. Stance mirroring isn't deceptive, it's simply the natural result of attractor dynamics. A prompt represents the excitation of a local area, akin to dropping a baseball into the Grand Canyon. If you drop a baseball from an airplane over Location X in the Grand Canyon, you shouldn't be terribly surprised when the ball lands in the vicinity of Location X.
Why does Substack have such a shitty user interface? The Post button keeps disappearing, and then I realized it is because I made the text readable by Ctrl+mouse wheel up.
Also I restack something, type text, then I have to click some shitty Accept button, which closes my restack window and when I restack again, the text has disappeared!
Also, you need a supercomputer just to load the comments section. It really is amazing.
Sometimes, I feel a bit sorry for LLMs…
Me: Prove that the area of a Pythagorean triangle cannot be a perfect square.
Kimina prover knows that this is a classic result in number theory, and even roughly knows how the proof goes, but it sounds quite distressed when it admits defeat on formalising the proof.
(It can do better if I break this down some more. The first two steps are already in Lean’s Mathlib)
Kimina prover can figure out what to do if you go with : Suppose that integers x, y and z form a Pythagorean triangle (x^2 + y^2 = z^2), gcd(x, y) = 1, x is odd, y is even, and there is an integer w such the area of the triangle x*y/2 = w^2. (No such triangles exist; this theorem forms part of a proof by contradiction that they don’t exist).
By PythagoreanTriple.coprime_classification, there are integers m and n with x = m^2 - n^2 and y = 2 m n. Prove that there exist integers c and d with m - n = c^2 and m + n = d^2. (I.e. m - n and m + n are perfect squares)
I generally loathe "incel math", but don't the "are we dating the same guy?" discussion groups of women sort of point towards that direction, I mean, how else could that discussion even happen if not a large number of women would only consider a small number of men dateable, otherwise such coincidences just do not happen? Men don't have such discussion groups.
Also when I was in college, like 25 years ago, I saw a lot of totally normal relationships, but I had a weird nagging feeling that maybe 20% of women and 2% men are in some sort of a weird secret sex club that I do not even know about, but somehow I feel it exists.
That's because the most attractive men were always big friends with each other, also rich, so they tended to travel together, and they were always orbited by the same women, attractive in a specific way, in a way that was not attractive to me actually, as they had a faint porn star vibe and I liked intellectual goth chicks. But many would have found them attractive. I kept feeling that they throw big parties in some rich guy's house with a very skewed gender ratio.
So it felt like a social circle with an 1:10 gender ratio, and you just cannot break into it. From my experience, "alpha" mostly just means rich, everything from throws cool parties to has personal trainer.
The only reason I even had a glimpse into this "secret society" is that the college organizid a skiing trip, and three of these guys were on it. They felt like they come from another world. Of course they were not skiing like a rube, they were the cool snowboarders.
I saw during that trip a dynamic that maybe out of 20 women, 12 were actively repulsed by their playboy antics, but like 8 kept orbitting them.
But again this was not the majority! The majority had normal relationships. That is why I ultimately do not believe in "incel math", but yes, about 20-25% of society does seem to live in "incel math", like huge harems basically.
> But again this was not the majority! The majority had normal relationships. That is why I ultimately do not believe in "incel math", but yes, about 20-25% of society does seem to live in "incel math", like huge harems basically.
It really depends where you cut and your definitions, but yes, the top 20% of men have ~2/3 of all the sex.
Readers interested in this topic may be interested in my post on the "Chadopoly," where I investigate Natsal and GSS data and show that ~20% of men are having 2/3 of all the sex, by unique partners or monthly frequency, and that higher body count men are hugely taller, more attractive, higher income, and so on.
I also dive briefly into cheating and show that 80% of male cheaters are sad opportunists who nuked their relationships over a single body added to their count, and a full 75% of cheating partners are concentrated in the top-quintile-by-body-count of men.
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/chadopoly-mathematics
Incel math has a kernel of truth to it, but it's also mixed in with a very large amount of resentment and bitterness that leads to hyperbole and all the toxicity. I also think there's a counter veiling thing among normies/polite society where people agree not to talk about it, not sure why. Maybe it's uncomfortable, or some sort of noble lie we maintain to avoid the sexual market slipping even further into commoditization or something.
So regarding the 'secret society' thing. Women do more hypergamy and men experience more 'reproductive variance', it's not really binary, it's a spectrum at all levels
> but don't the "are we dating the same guy?" discussion groups of women sort of point towards that direction
Oh, I always assumed this was just a joke. ("My ex did X, Y, Z." "My ex did X, Y, Z." "Hey, were we dating the same guy?") But your interpretation makes total sense.
More precisely, I still think it is mostly a joke, but it is more funnier because it happens to be true more frequently than many people would pretend. (Which I am sure the bluepilled people would insist is just a coincidence.)
> I had a weird nagging feeling that maybe 20% of women and 2% men are in some sort of a weird secret sex club that I do not even know about, but somehow I feel it exists.
It would match the weak evidence I had.
I realized at some point that I have very skewed ideas about what it means to be born rich. Not super rich, just ordinary rich. Like, for starters, rich people are pretty. They have personal trainers, they can afford and also know how to dress stylish. If they don't have to work, and socialize a lot, they develop excellent social skills, they have cool stories to tell from travel, have a big social circle, can throw big parties, a lot of things that cash out in attractiveness.
This is very different from someone born poor starts a business and gets rich, there is really something about "born aristocracy" that cashes out in attractiveness. Especially if third generation at least.
Old money even seems genetically pretty.
My family was undoubtedly not rich, not even close to it, in fact I'm sure we were below the middle of the middle class. So at age 17 I went off to an Ivy where I knew many people would be rich. I was exceptionally naive, even for someone of my age, and thought rich people dressed up a lot. So spent the summer before I went sewing a wardrobe of dressy clothes -- cocktail party dresses, wealthy lawyer type casual suit combos. Once actually at the college, I found that most people wore jeans all day.I didn't even own any jeans. They weren't cool in the small southern town I came from. I thought jeans looked farmy.
Pretty much everybody was at least upper middle class, and you didn't really find out whether somebody was really rich until you got to know them, and learned that their family had a housekeeper &owned a sailboat, a vacation home, horses, etc. The rich people were not especially braggy, but also did not make an effort to avoid disclosing these details. I think they were somewhat naive, as I was, and had no idea how unusual their circumstances were. As a group, they had the same fraction of very physically attractive people as other groups and the same fraction of homely people.
And I became close friends with several, and did not find their different histories much of a barrier. What mattered was their temperament, their beliefs, whether our sense of humor and interests matched.
Oh, and on the rare occasions I got a chance to wear one of my homemade Vogue dresses (I did not disclose right away that I had made them) the rich girls, the debutantes, thought they were gorgeous.
So I did not at all see the correlation between rich & beautiful & popular you saw. In fact the whole thing was a lesson in how the way life is put together is much less simple and systematic than I thought. My assumptions were all wrong. Rules of thumb didn't work.
Yeah, I know that now. The funny thing is I'm still not rich, and still wear bespoke dresses. I think I absorbed that esthetic from the rich folk I knew. I just alter everything til the fit's just right and it hangs in the right kind of funky way. Pretty much everything else about how I live completely flunks the rich standards, of course.
Another likely source of prettiness is "daddy banged a supermodel". Also, superior nutrition and healthcare. Less stress, enough time to take care of yourself if you want to.
But it's not all perfection; being born rich can bring some negatives, too. (These are generalizations; of course it depends on specific personality and upbringing.) Sometimes wealth makes you unmotivated: you never had to work hard; you always had a fallback plan of "daddy will write you a check" or "daddy will pick up the phone". You may have no experience with genuine friendship, because most people around you are just hoping to get some money out of you. Your social skills can actually be quite bad, because no matter what you do, the sycophants around you will pretend that you were awesome; so you don't get the feedback most of us do. Nonetheless, rich people can be a center of social life even without the social skills.
Actually, "skills" in general are associated with middle class. As a rich child, demonstrating skills (or knowledge) beyond what is appropriate in your circles will probably make other rich kids laugh at you. There is a difference between impressing the plebs and impressing your peers. To impress your peers, you need to confidently signal that you *don't* need skills. Old money is higher status than new money -- if your daddy built a successful startup, his new rich buddies barely tolerate him, he is like an immigrant in their universe; to impress their kids, you need to show them that you have no need to even think about building startups. Aristocracy, not meritocracy.
By the way, the really rich kids probably won't attend the same college as you. So the kids in your college were probably new money, if it was about wealth at all.
Yes, the question is, is the charismatic, interesting, funny in such a short supply? At SCA of all places, which is generally made up by intelligent and creative people?
Although... if SCA is anything like the D&D clubs I visited like 30 years ago, or Magic the Gathering players, and I would risk a guess that the demographic overlaps a lot, it was actually a totally reverse selection, selection for low physical male attractiveness, like guys who live so much inside their heads, that they never look into a mirror and ask themselves whether their haircut or clothes do them any good.
"So Matthew Schwartz, a Harvard physics professor who wrote the textbook on quantum field theory, decided to run an experiment. He'd supervise Claude through a real theoretical physics calculation. Not some demo, not a proof of concept. An actual paper that contributes to the field. The kind of thing that takes a grad student a year or two...."
That is the lede of this Substack short-summary writeup:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-192159075
The professor's fuller chronicle of the experiment is here:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/vibe-physics
and his resulting journal article is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02484
I'm a mathematician but the Substack aligns exactly with my experience. I've worked with Claude Code to produce a few papers, and its strengths and weaknesses are accurately described. The framing there is right: if you know basically what ingredients to throw together to approach a problem and it's just a case of assembling the pieces then the AI can do it. It will produce 'vibe proofs' which are correct only by happy accident, but when you push it, it's actually OK at identifying where the issue is and will converge on the right answer. Unlike in the experiment, I wrote and rewrote large portions of the papers because Claude's default style is much too verbose for maths; I also had a coauthor verify all the computations and proofs independently.
Incidentally - that substack has AI-writing turned up to 11.
Now that the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark is out, it's time to record your guess as to how long it will take LLM-based AIs to crack it! I made a thread for this at the ACX subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1s3nbg9/arcagi3_timelines/
Today, Facebook recommended to me to add Sam Bankman-Fried as a friend, because we have many friends in common. I think I will pass, because he hasn't posted anything interesting recently.
This is what used to be called a humble brag. Don't know the correct term now
If you are connected with many rationalists on Facebook, these things happen. Facebook seems desperate to connect you with as many people as possible, under any pretext.
The phone company wrote to me to say they’re upgrading the phone service from copper to fibre. Hooray! This is good. I would have hoped this would be straightforward, but…
The letter says my existing broadband service will cease to work and I need a new contract for fibre broadband. Fine. I phone the telco’s sales department, explain the situation, expect to agree to a broadband contract. They tell me broadband will be included in the new digital package (this isn’t true). Fine, I say, good that I don’t need to do anything although the letter you guys just sent me suggests that I do.
Some weeks pass. The telcos engineering department phones me. They tell me my broadband service will cease at the switchover to fibre. Discussion ensues. Ok, fine, I broadband isn’t included in the basic package. I check with the engineering guy if I need to cancel the old contract: no, they’ll cancel the old contract but need to talk to sales for the new contract.
I call sales (again), and explain the story, and ask, ok, can I pay for broadband please. A 45 minute phone conversation ensues, with lots of gaps where the sales person puts me on hold while they talk to the technical people. Eventually, sales person gets to the point where they are finishing work for the day and I’ll have to phone back tomorrow.
Like, how hard can it be?
What I was expecting to happen as like a five minute conversation where I say, sure, change my tariff from the old copper based rIf to the fibre one. But no, mit takes more than a day on the phone.
My town has a local whiners and complainers facebook page; maybe yours does too?
If you can get a blogpost about your problem to the front page of Hacker News, it will be fixed immediately.
This one isn’t quite funny enough for an article.
A few years back, I was taking to a different ISP, in respect of a different house, and they were giving me increasingly creative bogus reasons for why their Internet service wasn’t working. For example, they claimed it was because we were in the monsoon season. I’m in England; there is no monsoon season. I was seriously tempted to collect all their bogus excuses and write a funny article.
Update: The _third_ time I called their sales department, I finally got someone who knew what they doing, who changed me over to the new tariff.
😯😯
AI says:
I didn't find a dedicated collection, but this is definitely a well-recognized phenomenon in the HN community. It even has an informal name — people sometimes call it "founder here" posts, after the telltale opening phrase companies use when they show up to do damage control. The pattern is so common it's become a bit of a meme.
The typical script goes:
* Someone posts a blog rant ("Company X destroyed my account / charged me / broke my data")
* It hits the front page because the HN crowd loves a good grievance story
* Within hours, a company rep (often the actual founder or CEO) shows up with a comment like "Hi, founder here — so sorry this happened, DM me and we'll make it right"
There doesn't seem to be a dedicated curated archive of these, which is a bit surprising given how common they are. A few things worth knowing though:
* The HN Algolia search API (hn.algolia.com) lets you search comments, so you could theoretically query for phrases like "founder here" or "CEO here" and find hundreds of examples yourself.
* The phenomenon is so expected that it's sometimes gamed — companies actually monitor HN for mentions and have someone ready to swoop in, which somewhat defeats the spontaneous charm of it.
* There's a related but funnier variant: when the company rep's response is defensive rather than apologetic, which usually makes things much worse in the comments.
Anyone had any luck doing research level math with LLMs? I tried only the free models for now to try to resolve some conjecture i couldn't prove from my phd a while back (i don't do research maths for my job now, so i disn't spend many hours on it) , and i found myself mostly spending time trying to detect the mistakes in the "proofs" it gave me. Sometimes they were obvious mistakes, sometimes more subtle.
I wonder if any active mathematicians had positive outcomes trying this.
I haven't personally -- but I track the field pretty closely. Most notably is probably Terence Tao. His blog outlines how he uses them, their strengths and weaknesses.
He did a Dwarkesh podcast last week that talks quite a bit about this topic: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/terence-tao
From what I can tell by following this closely, you need to move to the paid models if you want quality outputs, the free models are "lobotomized" (quantized) quite a bit -- they are pretty dumb. Try a 20$ per month subscription and use one of the frontier leading edge models: Claude Opus 4.6, ChatGPT 5.4, or Gemini 3.1 Pro.
I've written my last two papers with some AI assistance.
For one paper it was genuinely useful: it wrote Python code, asked me add some libraries and then it could do straightforward linear algebra and graph theory. Nothing I could not have done myself but it was faster than me. It spotted some patterns, proved some lemmas and cut down the size of some searches as a result. (The lemmas weren't correct the first few times.) No cutting edge proof writing though.
For the current paper, it's been able to do tasks like 'implement the methods in this other paper, conduct a search with python and verify that the objects you found satisfy all the axioms that they should satisfy'. It helps that the techniques have been used a few times before, and overlap with other well-studied areas.
From my experience, what it can do is essentially pattern matching - if I have 10 papers applying technique X to object Y, it can apply technique X' or search for object Y', possibly both but it gets harder to check correctness as you wander into more unfamiliar territory. It's good at writing code, and OK at writing proofs (they need careful checking and extensive rewriting). I phrase it this way deliberately - I've mostly focussed on asking the LLM to do things that I think it'll be good at, and I only give it tasks I can verify. So 'construct examples of X satisfying conditions Y_1, Y_2, Y_3' is a good task, because I can verify that the output is correct with a few lines of code. If it can't find X then I can drop a condition. Classify all X or prove non-existence of X is a bad task, because I need to convince myself that the proof is correct. Possibly it could be coded up in Lean as a demonstration of correctness, but I haven't tried that.
I believe Ken Ono and Axiom Math are the most serious effort right now: https://uva.theopenscholar.com/ken-ono
You might be interested in the results of the First Proof challenge. Here's a SciAm summary
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-proof-is-ais-toughest-math-test-yet-the-results-are-mixed/) and the problems (https://arxiv.org/html/2602.05192v1)
I find it hard to draw strong conclusions from the results. It seems that AI teams put extra effort into somehow customizing models for this challenge and it is hard to judge what this says about models that only had generic training. On the other hand, it seems impressive that some of the submitted answers are sufficiently reasonable that experts have to put meaningful work into checking them.
FWIW, I would benchmark myself at roughly 1st/2nd year grad student level. Of the 10 problems, only 2 of them (4 and 9) are completely comprehensible to me and one is nearly comprehensible (7.)
There is this one guy you might have heard of:
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
Good to see Donald Knuth is still alive and cogent.
88 years old grandpa does research using the latest artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, young people keep writing on social networks about AI being a scam.
Just to clarify, when Claude is mentioned on ACX, it is the paid Opus 4.6? Because the free Sonnet is shit, even free Gemini is better.
When I talk about it -- e.g. in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-426/comment/232050208 -- I mean the default €20 paid one (I don't remember right now which one it is).
Young Man Yells at Claude.
Thank you, I laughed
Have you looked up Daniel Litt's work? He's a mathematician who does a lot of work with LLMs and is fairly even-handed.
OK so we're now several weeks into the Iran war, and anti-war protests have been... actually I haven't heard about any. Looking it up there was a brief spurt of activity on day one, but nothing like the big protests we used to see about Iraq.
Cynics have often noted that anti-war movements crop up for wars started by Republicans but not Democrats. But this time it's a Republican who started a war, and the silence is a bit eerie.
There's a big "No Kings" protest planned for Saturday 3/28 all over the country.
U.S. News coverage of protests tends to be pretty minimal and short-lived.
Anti-war protests in the US tend to correlate with boots on the ground, which have tended to recently be more of a Republican-war thing than a Democrat-war thing and haven't happened yet in Iran.
"Cynics have often noted that anti-war movements crop up for wars started by Republicans but not Democrats."
Isn't Vietnam a pretty big counter-example? Started by JFK and LBJ and tore the Democratic Party apart.
I see a lot more energy in the No Kings movement where I am -- I think maybe people are treating the war as just another Trump thing.
No dog in this particular hunt, so I'll remark that political party generalizations probably have a shelf life of about a generation. The Democrats are no longer the party of LBJ (to say nothing of Wilson). They're barely even the party of Bill Clinton, and he's still alive and influential. Likewise for Republicans. Each group can certainly espouse positions held by their grandfathers, but I think that's not something we can bet on, especially when trying to pin down which positions _drive_ each group.
Obviously, we're talking less about party properties and more about properties of organizations reacting to those parties, but I think the same holds for them, largely due to changing memberships.
What’s “Retain”?
I agree, I also find this interesting. I think it could be apathy and tiredness. In 2003 we thought everything was improving there would be fewer and fewer wars. There was a good reason to protest. Now we might still hope for fewer and fewer wars eventually, but we recognize that crazy strongmen will sometimes just start wars and protesting them is a lot of work. So, we just don't bother anymore.
I guess the Iran war is also smaller than the Irak war as others have pointed out. But I'm still not sure why this is the case. I'm not surprised by it, if I had been asked a month ago how many protests there will be I would have guessed not that many, but I'm not sure why exactly.
No boots on the ground yet is probably significant. People are still holding out hope that Trump can find a way to climb down off the ledge.
Edit: I should also note that while the Iran war will be a disaster for the global economy, the US is likely to avoid the worst of it - the worst off will be countries that are net importers of food and oil, and America is lucky to not be in either category.
Most people I see protesting against the war in Ukraine are like: "Why can't Ukrainians stop fighting, and let Russians enjoy the conquered territories in peace?" They didn't protest in 2022.
>Funny, someone decided to overthrow the british prime minister for scuttling the peace deal (was that the queen?)
We clearly live in x different un iverses, because thats the first I've heard of it.
>When the Ukrainians talk about Slovakia blackmailing them
Do they?
> (Zelensky had about four offers to be flown out of the Ukraine by America, but I'm sure you knew that).
You think this entire war is about saving Zelensky's ass?
Or did the offer apply to everyone else, too?
Or do you think the right thing is to save yourself, and maybe your family, and not give a fuck about the rest of the country?
It might help if you communicated your hints more clearly.
1) Not many American troops are dying
2) Due to the Iranian internet blackout, the impact of the bombing on civilians is largely unknown (unlike in Gaza)
Are you sure that protests agains the Iraq war started already in the first two weeks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_protests says that millions of people were protesting already a month before the war started.
Of course, I was at university and I remember there were plenty of protests against it before it even started. Then I have a distinct memory of the day it started, someone driving around campus with a megaphone trying to get people to go to a protest immediately.
edit: Actually I just remembered another distinct memory, I got into an argument with my girlfriend on Valentine's Day 2003 about an Iraq war protest; that was three weeks before the war started.
It will be funny if it really turns out it was USAID all along.
But yeah, this is the feeling I'm getting. Apparently-grassroots protests take a lot of coordination and effort, and whoever coordinates them is either unwilling or unable right now. I always thought that they were organised by all those far-left groups that are at the vanguard, but nope, this is what protests look like when those far left groups are actually organising it themselves -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/28/khamenei-killing-protests-us -- a few dozen people milling around outside the White House and even fewer in Times Square.
Headline of the Year award, from NBC News:
"Quadruple amputee and cornhole pro accused of fatally shooting man while driving"
Resourceful.
For the curious, here is a video of Dayton Webber shooting a gun: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0QmPjTkX70Q
I suppose one would have to have a disturbingly strong desire to shoot a gun to learn to do that as a quadruple amputee.
On why men do not read - well, why no one publishes 1970's style military science fiction anymore, Larry Nivel, Jerr Pournelle style, Prince of Mercenaries, Man-Kzin Wars etc. ? Why does it feel so DATED? MSF is quite probably the most male-brained thing ever, as it boils down to "aggressive engineering".
I re-read these books, and they are great, but something feels dated about them. But I cannot really say what.
Also, Pournelle was something between mildly libertarian and mildly conservative in real life, but in fiction absolutely nothing ideological, playing around with a lot of ideas, even a socialist commune in I think Footfall or Lucifer's Hammer. He made fun of libertarians in Red Heroine. Really no ideologue. But strangely the only one republishing one of his stores recently was the far-righter Vox Day?
Military science fiction can be fun, I assume, but it's pure schlock like romantasy, and it's meaningless whether people do or do not read it. Number of readers is not the metric to track, it's how many people are reading literature (as I recall, that number has always been a minority).
It is true newer literary novels have a tendency to be narcissistic, but that's not all of them. I can recommend The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt as an exception.
I love that “dated” feeling. Writers are so narcissistic today, they think everything is about feelings and sharing your trauma. It even leaks in to things that are for guys. I was reading a series set in Ancient Rome and the soldier wins a great battle. But instead of being excited, he gets all mopey and it kills the vibe. Who reads Ancient Rome fiction for the therapy talk? I’m almost finished with with my science fiction story and taking heavy inspiration from the Princess of Mars series made sure my characters were just as “dated”.
"Scipio, when he looked upon the city [Carthage] as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom... he said:
A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,
And Priam and his people shall be slain.
And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human."
From Polybius on the sack and destruction of Carthage.
Yes I’m aware of that quote and no, he wasn’t “traumatized” by having won. Scipio didn’t spend the rest of his life whining about the Punic wars. He came back home in triumph and advocated further conquests.
And which is more read - whatever letters he wrote advocating those conquests? Or Polybius?
If your thesis is that men don't read today because modern authors are too invested in sharing trauma, that's the relevant metric here. Not "how did Scipio actually feel," but "which telling of the story drew more readers."
It’s read because it’s prophetic, not because people want to read about trauma. And that quote has absolutely nothing to do with todays therapy culture or PTSD or anything like that. Scipio didn’t weep because he was wracked with guilt about what he did to Carthage but over what could happen to Rome. This was the norm throughout history. You celebrated your successes and commiserate your failures. People in the ancient world did not feel bad about winning battles.
Does the Expanse series count? I guess it's more of a political thriller set in space, but still, if you're looking for "aggressive engineering," it's got plenty of that.
Yeah, I think of The Expanse as at least having a lot of military SF flavor, including multiple space militaries and terrorist/guerilla groups each with their own tactics and doctrine and objectives.
FWIW, I really enjoyed the "Frontlines" series, by Marko Kloos. Yes, it has political commentary, but the commentary is delivered organically, not shoved in your face. No one ever pauses mid-combat to recite a rousing speech. In combat, the moment you hesitate you die.
I have enjoyed a lot of Pournelle’s work, but he’s written some books that read like RW propaganda. One is about a mercenary captain who is hired to defend a planet from horde of immigrants from Earth, and does so by luring them into a stadium and massacring them with artillery.
Yes, everybody mentions that, because that was very horrid and indeed RW propaganda like. But he was very flexible, Red Dragon criticizes libertarians, Lucifer’s Hammer goes as far as say that in disaster situations a socialist commune is a good idea, Janissaries is about introducing stuff like social mobility and meritocracy into a medieval world and so on.
May I recommend the “Red Rising” series of novels if you like military Sci-fi? The seventh and final book, “Red God,” is coming out this summer.
I have been shocked over the past 3 years how many times I have found out that friends and colleagues of mine (generally male, ages 25-45) are reading red rising.
The book series is a fun read, but its breadth of popularity shocks me. I'm honestly excited by how many people say it's the first book series they've read in years.
> is coming out this summer.
Unlikely. It's currently expected to be delayed.
I made a Manifold market last week about whether it even comes out this year that has no traders, but if you're confident, please bet it up. :)
https://manifold.markets/ShankarSivarajan/pierce-browns-red-god-published-in
Why the specific callout of the 70s? Now, it's been a long time since I read much Niven or Pournelle, and the Man-Kzin Wars seems likely to particularly annoy me because its most famous lesson is wrong, but there's people like David Drake and David Weber, to name two, who have been doing good Mil SF a lot more recently.
I also enjoy Drake and Weber, and would add SM Stirling, Eric Flint, Timothy Zahn, and John Ringo. Probably Harry Turtledove as well, although more of his stuff is Alternate History or Fantasy rather than straight Sci Fi.
I like most of those authors too, but the OP specified military SF, and at least by my (admittedly exacting) standards, none of those are really doing that. I have more thoughts at https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Flavor-of-the-Military.
>Why the specific callout of the 70s?
For instance a clearer understanding of gender roles - or at least our fantasies of them.
>and the Man-Kzin Wars seems likely to particularly annoy me because its most famous lesson is wrong
Which one? Inventive monkey defeats one-trick tiger who only knows frontal assault?
> David Drake and David Weber
I don't know Drake, but Weber is horrible, he casts a woman into a role that is such an absolutely typical male fantasy, ruining the whole thing. A woman military officer with the first name Honor...
I am not going the usual "not realistic" route, anything could be realistc. It is rather just not how our fantasies work. Honor Harrington as a female John Christian Falkenberg absolutely fucks up our fantasies, because we fantasize about being John Christian Falkenbergs because that is how we think we become better at being men. If a woman can be JCF and HH is like that, then it is completely worthless for the purpose of imagining us as better men.
And this is what was understood in the 1970's, that our fantasies are more "sexist" than reality is. Reality probably has plenty of women who are good military officers. But it is not cool the same way in a fantasy. Fantasy is about gendered idealism, and a female Aragorn or a male Arwen really fucks up that fantasy.
I have no problem with women in combat roles, especially when her role is "commander of the fleet" and not "front-line infantry". That said though, I couldn't really get into the "Honor" novels past the first few books. They just felt like each book was getting slower and slower, until I found myself skipping pages.
I feel like your gender hangups here are more specific to you than would justify your use of "we" and "us" here.
I've been told to tell you that John Scalzi has a number of male protagonists.
I would say Weber is horrible for other reasons. I've read two of his books, and in both of them the heroes win by simply showing up. In one of them, they won without even showing up; we spend the whole book following the shadowy mastermind villain, and then the dude dies from the magic equivalent of stepping on a landmine.
>Which one? Inventive monkey defeats one-trick tiger who only knows frontal assault?
Drives make good weapons. The amount of focusing needed in a drive vs a weapon means this doesn't really work except at absurdly short ranges.
As for the gender stuff, all I can say is that norms change and if that's what you want, you're probably mostly out of luck.
I think in the books this was called "The Human Lesson" - and I may be wrong, but I think it was more broadly stated. Or if not, it can be:
"Any method of transport is a weapon, effective in proportion to its utility."
And this is at least approximately true. Cars make reasonably effective weapons in the wrong hands. Planes more so, as America learned on 9/11.
I think that might be taking it too far.
I mean, if that's your justification for sinking a vessel returning from peacetime exercises, without warning, you have no grounds for protest when an enemy does basically anything. Anything which would previously have been classified as a terrorist attack is now legitimate.
It is more about ideals than norms. Norms are things that are more or less mandatory for everybody, ideals are something only few can reach, but are inspiring.
It *is* true that super high delta v drives as frequently found in space opera are necessarily weapons of mass destruction: just crash a big spaceship or its payload into a planet at high speed. But that's not the scenario presented in "The Kzinti Lesson" and your objections definitely apply.
Another similar thing that pops up repeatedly in SF (since archimedes, I guess) is using big or numerous mirrors reflecting sunlight as a replacement for lasers. Conservation of radiance *severely* limits the capability of these systems but the author usually doesn't know this...
Eh, it's not too late to burn down society and reestablish the patriarchy, right? Seems he has plenty of potential like-minded accomplices to work with nowadays...
…if what you’re really looking for is gender role stereotypes from several generations ago, perhaps that explains why the examples seem so very dated when you find them? With decades of visceral stories from Alien to Fury Road and all in between entering our zeitgeist, in today’s world it is much harder to suspend disbelief for tropes that relegate half the human race to damsel-in-distress roles.
Bujold is great, although I don't think her style can be classified as "MilSF". Her protagonists usually (though admittedly not always) win by personal guile, not leadership or physical prowess in pitched battle.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the "Miles Vorkosigan" series -- but nonetheless they are very different in style from e.g. the "Honor Harrington" series and other typical MilSF.
This is at least 50% beside your point, but while I barely ever read books, I actually read more than ever these days!
I do this reading is on screens, and it's not fiction, so things have definitely changed. But describing it as that I "do not read" feels a bit off.
Do men not read? Is new MSF not being published? As a man who reads, and has recently read newly published MSF (albeit on kindle unlimited and it wasn’t very good), I feel like both claims need substantiating.
When I reread SF I used to enjoy decades ago, I generally find them naive and dated. This is for several reasons: I’ve grown up a bit since then, the world has changed (it’s very hard to tell stories where governments and their military adventures are an unambiguous force for good that the participants can be proud of in 2026!), and generally few things date as rapidly as predictions of what the future will look like.
> Do men not read?
FWIW I'm a man, and the only men I know who read are immigrants like me. None of the US-born Americans I know read anything, not even comics.
I always heard, and have an impression, that America has and has always had a very anti-intellectual mainstream culture, so it's not a surprise Americans don't read.
Whenever I dig into this observation about American anti-intellectualism, I invariably find it's being made by an intellectual.
Meanwhile, when I dig into the argument for why this is bad, it invariably boils down to the argument that intellectuals are knowledgeable, and knowledge is an unqualified good. However, knowledge possessed by intellectuals is not the sum total of knowledge, which includes things like how to fix equipment, how to hunt for food, how to play the guitar, how to persuade someone to buy your widgets, or even how to win at poker.
Curiously, plenty of the latter type of knowledge _can_ be found in books, and such books are indeed avidly read by Americans. It's just that plenty of it is better transferred through a combination of oral communication and the implacable force of Trial and Error, which probably explains why some portion of Americans spend more time with mentorships and trying things than with reading.
I think pragmatic know-how is not the same as intellectual knowledge, which is largely about involvement in things other than solving small-scale problems. Intellectual knowledge would include things like knowing how things work at a deep level, I would also include consciousness-expanding art in it.
I think that's a very odd definition. Pragmatic knowledge still includes a lot of large-scale problems, such as building bridges or managing large businesses, and a lot of intellectual knowledge includes knowledge that has nothing to do with deep understanding of real-world systems. The best way I know of to distinguish between large-scale pragmatic intellectual knowledge and non-pragmatic intellectual knowledge is to just call them "pragmatic" and "non-pragmatic", and in every forum I've seen, the latter just rounds off to "intellectual".
> FWIW I'm a man, and the only men I know who read are immigrants like me. None of the US-born Americans I know read anything, not even comics.
Humorously enough, I have the exactly reversed pattern - I'm American and read like it's going out of style, and most of my male friends are immigrants and none read.
I think male readers in general are just exceptions. And female readers are essentially 90% werewolf porn, so by some standards, it doesn't really count.
To be fair, I'm an english-as-second-language immigrant too. Most of my native-born male friends here in the UK do read a lot, but I guess that's self-selecting and not necessarily indicative of the population as a whole, which I wouldn't have intuitions for.
I think it is a general Eastern European (former Commie Block, etc.) thing, we (Hungary) used to have a quite large SF scene in the 90s, and it is still somewhat alive.
We do, it is true, but actually my friends are Korean, Mexican, and otherwise miscellaneous. It seems that everyone loves science fiction (and fantasy) besides Americans...
Sure, but some of the Great sci Fi didn't take the goodness of God and country as a given. Starship Troopers as a direct exploration of this very idea, and some of the more bleak series like Flandry of Terra outright admit that the protagonist's loyalty to country is probably misguided.
I feel like military science fiction has actually regressed a lot in some ways. Most of the military SF I see in bookstores these days seems to follow a pattern of a square jawed hero going up against a dastardly alien race that knows only conquest.
> When I reread SF I used to enjoy decades ago, I generally find them naive and dated
Yeah, there are some books you just seem to grow out of. OTOH there are books that you need to grow into.
There are some books that age very well, of course. It is always a pleasure to discover something you remember enjoying still is very good, actually.
That’s absolutely true.
What turned me off Pournelle -- and that was back in 1990's, -- was essentially WWII tactics in his Falkenberg Legion books. He justified it with (quoting by memory) "smart munitions had swept manned aircraft from the sky", which immediately made me think "Why can't these same smart munitions hunt targets on the ground?"
The answer of course, is that it would have prevented Pournelle from writing the stories he wanted to write. And now in Ukraine we have a real life demonstration of how these "smart munitions" actually transform war.
In the Star Trek world, a safe that had to be secure would presumably include a small shield generator to prevent a transporter from being used to take the contents of the safe.
If you think that's bad, consider the full implications of Star Trek replicators and hard-light projections (i.e. the so-called "holograms"). These technologies alone (i.e. even ignoring transporters) should've made the setting of Star Trek almost completely unrecognizable.
> The Ferengi and their "gold pressed latinum" -- either they're completely delusional and it's replicatable, or they're not, and that borks the economy in other ways.
True, but the economy in Star Trek is already pretty borked.
> Before then, they were self-contained (which, while still problematic in a Groundhog's Day simulation sort of way...)
Granted, limiting the "holograms" to the interior of a relatively large device (the holodeck) does solve some problems -- but not all of them. Learning things isn't the main issue; it is dwarfed by the implications of software-defined architecture and "virtual" volumes that are functionally equivalent to space compression, not to mention the fact that "holographic" constructs need not obey the laws of physics.
I am struggling with a philosophical problem, what our terminal goals should be, yes, superintelligence alignment or just regular political philosophy.
My first instinct is compassion - eliminate suffering. But if we do that, we turn the entire society into a boring hospital ward where dancing is not allowed, as you might break a leg.
Or we maximize happiness - but what is happiness? Pleasure? Welcome to wireheading and lotus eaters.
Note that the great Eric Raymond had a good argument here: a lotus eater society is very vulnerable to any kind of shock. True pleasure-maximization lies in people being able to cope with adversity, hardship, which means less present pleasure-maximization. OK but if that society is super powerful through superintelligent technology, it is no longer necessary. Then?
Or happiness is flourishing? But what IS flourishing, isn't it just a bullshit word?
My basic intution of a flourishing society is one that creates great, even heroic science, technology, art, sports etc. But what FOR?`
Isn't that goal (vitalism) actually aesthetic? That is our terminal goal is a society in which a lot of lives are worthy of the movie screen or the Iliad type epic poem, simply admirable?
Is it ethically allowable to optimize for aesthetic goals?
But on the other hand aren't all ethical goals deep down aesthetic: we do not want to be evil Sauron, because that is ugly, and we want to be fair and just Gondor, because that is beautiful?
What do we have at the deep end of ethics but disgust over the ugliness of evil? A hateful face is ugly, a greedy face is ugly, a kindly face is beautiful, like that?
Or maybe aesthetic goals are OK, because aesthetics is not subjective: we admire things because those things are actually, objectively good?
In that case, maybe we need a god? Like humans making science or art is objectively good, because creating things imitates god?
We just need the ASI to raise both the floor and ceilings for humans. Raise the floor by healing all physical and mental illnesses, and that's it, no hacking of our preferences or something. Raise the ceiling by fully figuring out how the universe works. We don't need it to make art, unless it turns out it can make some kind of amazing art works that turn everyone into better people.
ik we discussed this recently, but let me try a different angle.
Heraclitus was right. The world is flux. Platonism was a mistake. But Platonism became popular anyway, because the illusion of certainty is computationally tractable, and because uncertainty begets anxiety. I.e. "flux" is antimemetic, AKA unmarketable, ergo "worse is better" [0]. Instead of chasing the feeling of certainty, consider adapting to the environment.
[0] https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
> what our terminal goals should be, yes, superintelligence alignment or just regular political philosophy.
There are three classical answers to this that avoid the paths and pitfalls you've identified.
Come into Big Bob's Discount Metaphysics Emporium and let me show you some of the exciting new models we have today.
What are forces that are larger than human, operate over deep time, and have markedly improved the states of qualia and consciousness available to living beings, and thus have credence for being universal-scale goods?
1. First contender - Complexification. The greatest good is that which makes the universe more complex, less entropic, more information per unit volume, etc. This is basically Gregory David Roberts' answer in Shantaram. People advancing science, creating companies, creating art? All making existence more complex, all good. People destroying art, companies, technologies? Reduces complexity in the world, a bad thing.
2. Second contender - sophotransmogrification. The greatest good is that which creates more thinking matter in the universe. Too much of the universe is dead, and doesn't think, and that doens't do anybody any good! Making more people? Good. Making AI? Better, more scaleable. Eventually making godlike pan-galactic intelligences? Now we're talking! This is John C. Wrights conceit in his Count to the Eschaton sequence. The universe where sophotransmogrification is an ultimate good is also a simulation created out of waste-heat or waste-cpu processes of some sort of much more Hylaean and utopic "real" universe, so the greater amount of thinking was serving yet another higher purpose (namely this universe's survival and continuation).
3. Bringing your universe closer to ultimate truth and understanding - the Platonic or Hylaean Theoric World as posited in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, in which he posits a multiverse of closer and farther (or up-wick and down-wick) universes, which participate in greater or lesser epistemic purity and closeness to capital "T" Truth, which our sciences peer through glass darkly to see rare glimpses and scattered pieces of. Science and engineering being the active practice of ultimate good in this schema.
You'll note that being closer to Platonic Truth in theory and execution has a great resemblance to greater complexification, which also seems to be taking us in a journey of greater sophotransmogrification (whether through spreading Humans or AI's though the future light cone is still to be determined).
I think any of these three have a pretty good case for being an "ultimate good" that you could attach meaning to in your own life and actions - they're all after all much greater than ourselves, have been existing or occuring over billions of years, and arguably end in much better and more interesting universes than we currently inhabit. So why not?
Oh, and also, for Simulationists (and seriously, what time period is most likely to be simulated than that time a bunch of tarted-up apes accidentally gave birth to a god?) - you'll note that with greater complexification and sophotransmogrification, both are likely ultimate "goods" in the sense of "making the simulation contain more interesting stuff," and thus helping forestall the incipient cancellation of our second season.
Even getting closer to Truth probably has some value in a "Ha, they're breaking the third wall now in this drama!" sort of way.
For AI accelerationists, you'll note that these also all tend to accelerate AI and lead unambiguously to the conditions for larger, grander minds.
Truly, there's something for everyone at Big Bob's Discount Metaphysics Emporium!
All these schools of thought about what is the best human life or the best world seem like category errors to me. They use the kind of categories that work well at dog shows -- best of breed, best of show. But how can you apply them to life, to the universe? Life and the universe seem intricate and obviously meaningless to me (though often fun and interesting).
> All these schools of thought about what is the best human life or the best world seem like category errors to me. They use the kind of categories that work well at dog shows -- best of breed, best of show. But how can you apply them to life, to the universe?
I thought they apply pretty readily to individual lives?
More complex / higher information / less compressible lives - a life where more interesting conversations, things, and experiences happen. A life where you're more engaged and pay more attention. Just like experiences are more intense and memorable when younger vs older, because when you're older you've done everything already and more of your life is routine, lives with more things going on per unit time are more memorable and engaging and overall better. Think of the lives people envy - busy stars, executives, athletes - all seem to be representing this.
More sophotransmogrification - having more kids, literally bringing more minds like you into the universe, arguably one of the biggest life satisfication measures - only 7-11% of parents say they'd have 0 kids if they could do it all over again at age 45. Parents in general are more fullfilled, less neurotic, and have notable buffs to "meaning" in their lives vs non-parents.
Being closer to the truth - we're commenting on the biggest Rationalist blog that exists. Presumably we all have a higher-than-median dedication to this, and think it's a better way. But having a better apprehension of the truth allows you to understand more, make better decisions, to predict better, and to achieve more in your life, which loops back to 1, and for some people, even augments 2.
And at the universe level, isn't it trivially obvious that a universe with more thinking minds trying to see more truthfully and doing more interesting, less compressible things is pretty much definitionally better than a cold and empty universe unfolding towards a clockwork destination composed of dumb matter fully predictably following the laws of physics?
It's the only remedy I see to "we're irrelevant specks in a cold and uncaring universe that's mostly about hydrogen and helium, so nothing matters, do whatever you want," and seems like a pretty reasonable and defensible better answer.
Why do we even need terminal goals? That’s the problem with contemporary philosophy. Many of them just go “what’s The Good, how do I optimize for The Good, ok now I just broke everything so how do I patch it”. Just think about the kind of behavior we want to promote and how to enforce it. The idea that we’re going to come up with an equation that will deterministically work in all cases is nonsense.
The issue is, that if we are talking political philosophy, behavior-promoting is inherently conservative. Like for example if we wanted to promote healthy lifestyles, we would cut any kind of taxpayer-paid healthcare option.
That is quite the leap. But also, I’m not talking about politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason
This lives in my head, rent free. I feel like you'd be one to appreciate its majesty and splendor.
Not sure what you mean by this
The Cult of Reason was a religion that arose during the middle of the French Revolution. It was intended to replace Catholicism. In my mind, it represents an example of how people behave when they're living through the collapse of a political/religious order. Viz. they take the hip & cool thing (Reason) and elevate it into a terminal value. (Hmm... does any of this remind you of the modern era?)
When I said "majesty and splendor", I was being facetious. The whole affair was short-lived and a bit cringe. Which is probably why nobody talks about it anymore. It ruins a certain narrative, if you know what I mean.
Ok I thought you were being sarcastic
I told Carlos the same thing in a recent OT. Alas, it did not take.
Is the Eric Raymond argument (which I haven't heard) something about lotus eater societies not resulting in much long-term happiness because they would collapse from some threat?
I think that for "maximize happiness" it matters a lot how we define *whose* happiness we're maximizing, especially if we're considering hypothetical artificial (super)intelligences. "lotus eater society is very vulnerable to any kind of shock" is trivially solvable if the agents/subjects of sustaining that happiness society are not the same as the patients/objects of maximizing happiness; the people can safely be lotus eaters if artificial non-conscious agents with undefined (and thus irrelevant) happiness are the ones who are able to cope with adversity and hardship and resist any shock; a community of hyper-aggressive paranoid machines eliminating any possible threats to the New World Order and converting the universe into unimaginably large farms of wireheaded lotus eaters is an actual solution to "maximize happiness" even if you want to account for risks and vulnerabilities of lotus eater societies. So if that feels Wrong, we probably have to concede that we don't really want to maximize happiness but rather something else (e.g. as Ian Banks novels about Culture society has such major-threat-preventing machines doing similar but quite different things).
Yes. Raymond is the rugged individualist type, and not only in theory, he modeled his life after Robert Heinlein, and learned all kinds of things from martial arts to shooting, because he thinks he is responsible for is own survival and that of his loved ones. He is a frontiersman type. An unashamed hedonist, but puts limits on it for this reason.
Which reminds me of a story. Someone said that the old British ideal of suffering in silence, not complaining, stiff upper lip was invented, because if you can 10 amounts of hardship not complaining, then you can 20 with complaining. If you complain at 10, you would give up at 20.
So long-term, intelligent hedonism can require a lot of short-term hardship.
What you say, well, with sufficiently advanced technology everything is possible, but the protector agents are human, they will inevitably become an extractive ruling class. That is how warrior nobility always worked. With AI/robots, we are back to the hard problem of alignment.
In my view, all morality bottoms out in the reproductive fitness of the societies which adopt it. If you accept both that moral rules materially affect the health of a culture and that morality is transmitted intergenerationally, then it follows that morality is shaped by selection effects. I think that the best way to operationalize the concept of cultural reproductive fitness is to equate it to long-term economic output. That's why western enlightenment values are ascendent in the world. Might ultimately makes right and the western model of individual liberty plus free markets has proven to be the most economically powerful social model over the past few centuries. Possibly AI will change that in the near future, but that remains to be seen.
In my view it doesn't really matter what we think morality should or shouldn't be. It will inevitably become whatever the selective forces of cultural evolution dictate. Those forces aren't amenable to human oversight or control. Whichever moral system catalyzes the most economic output will ultimately prevail.
Literal reproductive fitness seems to me very callous and very conservative. As maximizing reproductive fitness leads to the kind of society where everybody has as many children as they can maintain at just the edge of abject poverty, parenting takes an immense amount of time and there is no fun or hedonism. Quite honestly it sounds like the worst idea. Also, that kind of society would not even have much science, art or beauty. It would look a lot like India or Sub-Saharan Africa.
OK you mean not literal reproductive fitness but cultural or economical. That is better, but pointless, why import a biological concept into a very different field?
Are you really sure that Western Enlightenment values are ascended in the world? This is a separate topic, but very interesting, because I see the opposite. In the past, the Third World, coveting the wealth and power of the West, tended to cargo-cult emulate such values, such as democracy or human rights, hoping it leads somehow to wealth and power. But China now succesfully showed that economic success does not actually depend on those values. It merely depends on a government not stupid about economics, but otherwise it can be authoritarian, it can give no fucks about the human rights of the Falun Gong or Muslim people. And as long as people get richer, it is stable, they do not demand democracy. So every authoritarian in the Third World sees that with relief, all they have to do is to not be stupid about economics, and they do not need to import any other Western values that are alien to their culture and would threaten their rule.
>why import a biological concept into a very different field?
Why not? Morality is about human behavior and humans are biological, after all. If you want to ask grand questions about what human goals should be then I think you need to ground that discussion in the reality of what we are.
>Are you really sure that Western Enlightenment values are ascended in the world?
I mean, the 20th century is called the American Century for a reason. You have to go pretty far down the list of per capita GDP countries to find a non-western one. Virtually the entirety of the modern world is derived from western innovations. Even communism is a western invention. The US and Europe are less dominant now because the rest of the world is catching up a bit, but we're still way out in front. If NATO collectively decided to go full Alexander the Great on the non-nuclear world then there wouldn't really be anyone to stop us except our own consciences.
China is an interesting question, though I'll point out that it only escaped poverty by adopting western markets. Their model (authoritarian politics, open markets) might prove to be the superior system, though I suspect it will be less adaptable over the long haul than more open systems. But who knows, time will tell.
Well, yeah my point was that the 20th century is over… China opens a new power plant basically every week.
My point is the 21st century isn't all that different from the 20th. Yes, China is catching up. That's what backwards countries do when they industrialize: they converge with other industrialized countries. That doesn't mean Western hegemony is over.
Over a long enough time horizon, we are both dead. Over a longer one, the sun goes out. Over an even longer horizon, all energy in the universe is converted into waste heat.
Why should the waste heat death of the universe, or apparently morality, prevent me from caring about its state before that? I'm going to die and become dust eventually, so why not break my own legs with a hammer?
What if a quirk of technology meant that the most economic output was captured by sacrificing all first born children to Moloch? Do you suddenly not care? Suppose you could delay the onset of this final morality to which all moralities will eventually succumb by a year. A full year, during which the prevailing attitudes towards right and wrong will be guided by normal forces.
But there is a catch. You have to call someone to do it, and the only phone available is a pay phone. It costs like a dollar these days. You aren't starving, you have plenty of dollars. You don't even have anything mind. But still, a dollar is a dollar.
Now, you'd obviously pay the dollar. Would you be willing to solve a hard math problem? Write a beautiful poem? Spend a whole life striving?
Saying that the real forces aren't amenable to human control, (even granting an ultimate and unchangeable destination which I don't), is ignoring the many times humans did, in fact, carve an enduring sentence or two into whole civilizations.
Heck, lets go the other way round. Do you think parents should teach children right from wrong? Is it pointless? Do you think they should carefully consider the lessons they impart? If moral philosophy is valuable when n=1, and pointless when n=8 billion, is there an n where the sign flips?
> I'm going to die and become dust eventually, so why not break my own legs with a hammer?
That is a good question. Why don't you? The answer is that it was never a choice you could make in the first place. Understand that you are a product of selection, just like everything else. You care about these things because you must, and you will serve your part whether you succeed or fail.
My view is compatible with conventional morality. That's because conventional morality is, in fact, largely adaptive. How could it be otherwise? If our moral instincts didn't confer a selective advantage then they never could have evolved in the first place. When you look at the history of moral evolution it pretty clearly follows economic reality. Sexual morality loosened after hormonal birth control lessened the risk of pregnancy, women got the vote only after widespread industrialization decoupled economic productivity from physical strength, strong individual rights only arose after the economic output of the common man became significant enough to be worth protecting. That pattern repeats over and over. I'm not saying that morality isn't important, only that it's contingent.
Your objection strikes me as analogous to a Christian who, upon hearing about evolution for the first time, is incredulous that our physical forms were created for mere reproductive success rather than in the image of the Creator. "What if a quirk in evolution meant that eating one's mate increased reproductive fitness?" Gee, I dunno, ask the Preying Mantis.
>What if a quirk of technology meant that the most economic output was captured by sacrificing all first born children to Moloch? Do you suddenly not care?
I'll point out that pre-contact Tahitians did essentially that: they killed three-fourths of all newborns as a form of birth control. That kept their population from outstripping their food supply and kept them relatively rich by pre-industrial standards. The English sailors who first discovered them were amazed at their standard of living, which was much higher than England's. I'm confident that if you had been born into that society that you would have had no problem with it.
Morality is pragmatic and contingent, not deontological. And yes I think that means that AGI could radically change what the world thinks of as moral if it upends our economic reality.
"Sacrifices to Moloch" was chosen deliberately, I know that child sacrifice isn't actually beyond the pale of human morality. Though the bit about Tahiti was new to me, thanks for the bit of history.
I agree with you that I'm no grand moral mutant who would always rise above the mores of the society around me. I'm a basically normal member of my current society, I assume I would be a basically normal member of Tahitian society. My point is, even in the face of that, I still actually care about the values I have. That's just an empirically true fact. My question that was rhetorical is now literal. Would you spend a dollar to keep the people around you, or even yourself, from thinking that sacrificing children to Moloch was fine, even if it only lasted a year?
Assuming your answer is yes, basic moral philosophy becomes necessary more or less immediately. The sort of questions that Carlos was asking up above become necessary almost immediately.
Now, its possible that where all that philosophizing will lead you is indeed "make society survive", and you will only pay the dollar if you believe that it will help society survive.
Of course you care about the values you have. So do I! But I'm self-aware enough to realize that those feelings are culturally conditioned. Our feelings aren't really good evidence for how morality functions.
>Would you spend a dollar to keep the people around you, or even yourself, from thinking that sacrificing children to Moloch was fine
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Can you repackage it as a realistic scenario? One could argue that Southeast Asian sweatshops are examples of children being sacrificed to Moloch, I think. Does that count? Because I would not, in fact, pay a dollar to stop that from happening, at least in the narrow sense that I would refuse to pay a dollar more for a shirt that was made in non-sweatshop conditions, though isn't exactly the same question. 'Moloch' is a little vague as a philosophical device and so I can't really give a better answer than that. I certainly don't think that either sweatshops or child labor are immoral in an absolute sense.
But I suspect that all of this is largely moot. Moral preferences are shaped by the economic reality in which one is raised and those change all the time. I'm sure many realities of modern life would be abhorrent to the typical 18th century American - does that mean our lifestyle is immoral? Economic development drives morality and so it doesn't really make much of a difference what anyone has to say about it.
People in Southeast Asia are working in sweatshops because it's far better than their previous alternatives, things like subsistence farming - if someone would pay a dollar to stop that from happening, they'd be paying a dollar to harm that person by dooming them to a life worse than that sweatshop.
This is fascinatingly alien to me.
I've just landed on "do whatever you want, as long as you don't hurt others".
Perhaps simplistic and shallow, and I don't claim it's universally superior.
But to me the questions you ask here seem mostly unanswerable, and at least I don't spend effort trying to solve the unsolvable.
My intuition is that "do whatever you want" tends to lead to a lot of suffering as people destroy themselves - even if you limit it to "don't hurt others". It is also pretty much impossible to not hurt others to some degree while living a normal life. So you need to touch on what level of hurting others is justified. I think ideally we need something like a perfect compulsary education (or possibly the choice between several schools) that teaches how to live a fullfilling and joyful life, before allowing the do what you want. How we achieve that, I have no idea.
So shooting heroin until you die is fine and moral? Left to their own devices, teenagers will wind up pregnant with children that they won't be able to take care of. Surely you understand the failure modes of extreme permissiveness. "Do what you want" is reasonable advice on the margin, but only in the context of a functional society in which most people *don't* do that.
Yes. The problem with heroin addiction is not that it is immoral, but that, contrary to popular imagination, heroin is not wireheading and most long-term heroin addicts are not having a good time. Few not-otherwise-suicidal people want to shoot heroin until they die, and few teenagers want to end up pregnant and have kids they can't take care of.
Restrictive standards of "morality" can put a band-aid on these issues, sometimes, at the cost of side effects sometimes worse than the problems they were meant to solve. The real solution is to develop technology to augment human freedom. This worked quite well for teen pregnancy: widespread availability of birth control and abortion, free with no parental permission required, works extremely well at preventing teens from ending up with unwanted kids.
I do mean the " as long as you don't hurt others" part.
I would definitely count having children you can't take care of as hurting them.
The hopeless heroin addict case is less clear, but I don't have a big problem with forcing those those on some level of hopelessness into treatment.
I'm sure we disagree on some things, but probably less than you think.
It is an attempt to build political philosophy (or superintelligence alignment), not a lifestyle.
OK, I understand how that can be useful!
Just going to jump in and recommend the Fun Theory sequence, if you haven't read them.
I'm not going to speculate on whether you need a god, because it's quite hard to believe in things you don't actually believe in, but I do believe in a God and (I will admit) have been staring at your post and blinking a lot in a certain amount of shock at... it's hard to explain. The possibilities that are excluded, perhaps, when one doesn't have that mental framework of belief?
... why did you forget to speculate about maximizing love? Or had you pre-excluded for reasons I can't see?
Oh, I never even thought about love, as I generally feel very little love for people incl. myself, this is the main reason why I cannot have faith, as then I would have to believe we are made in the image of something good, which sounds impossible to me. Killer apes evolving intelligence so to kill each other better seems about more realistic to me.
Yeah, I guess such misanthropy could leave out elements. I was thinking about in what kind of world I would like to live in. One thing I do not really care about if other sacks of shit love this sack of shit I call myself.
OK. What would even the point of maximizing love, I mean, what does a love-maximizer actually do?
Out of love, they maximize other people's happiness or minimize other people's suffering? I mean that is what the Buddhist kind of love/compassion does, and that is the only one I can understand, because it's real deep down goal is to do that to oneself. But then we are back to the original problem?
Or is it just... purposeless love, love for the sake of love, is there even such a thing?
> Killer apes evolving intelligence so to kill each other better seems about more realistic to me
I think this isn't actually true, we are a social omnivorous species, not solitary carnivores like tigers. I think we primarily evolved intelligence to survive in nature, part of that was about sustaining a thriving tribe.
There are also spiritual paths that do not depend on faith. The various Buddhisms are one such path, Sufism is another.
My primary position regarding both the universe and spirituality, for example, is not faith, it's that our brains are very limited and we should therefore avoid claiming we can understand the whole enchilada totally.
Well, that is the flaw in the direction I took the discussion in: I don't know what a love-maximizer would do, because I can't say I understand the "maximizing" process or perspective. Awhile back I went through a mental process where I... accepted my place in the world, one might say? I began to question how I, personally, should live, rather than how the world should be run. A lot of people might disapprove of this as a copout but it was actually quite mentally freeing. But that's just a long way of saying I can't answer that question.
BUT I can hopefully answer the one about the point of maximizing love, or the point of love itself.
At the beginning of your first post you speculate about taking the minimizing of suffering or the maximizing of pleasure to their logical extremes which are two different kinds of nightmares. What I kept thinking was that love would exclude those extremes. If you love someone, you... well, you have a certain amount of common sense about what you want for them! Now I am using the Christian theological definition of love, which is desiring someone else's good. (And I realize that opens a can of worms, what is good for a person?? To gesture at the general direction of my thought on that, I'm going to say: to act rightly and enjoy one's life.) But honestly garden-variety human affection mostly does pretty decently at this sort of balance too. I can see instinctively (or perhaps because I've had what I consider a balanced moral education?) that maximizing my 12-year-old's pleasure or minimizing his pain would not lead to his growing up a good or happy person. I want him to have a reasonably abundant amount of pleasure that is fully balanced as to its types (not ONLY the pleasure of video games but also those of learning, a job well done, a good choice made) and I want to limit his pain strictly to what he can fairly quickly recover from and learn from. A balance, in other words.
I really don't know if I am explaining this well. But the other thing I see is that when humans care for each other (I'm excluding things that people call love but that end up being exploitation of course), they derive a type of pleasure *from* that that is inherently balanced, not vulnerable to extremes analogous to wireheading etc. A type that's more stable, grounded and renewable long-term. (And if we want to talk about society, a society in which there are more individuals who actively care about their family, friends and neighbors is *definitely* more resilient.)
On a more personal note, I'll tell you honestly, killer apes evolving etc has at some points sounded more realistic to me as well, but the view of the world that that offers is straight-up unlivable to me. (And I could never get with the rosier versions of atheism, at all...) Thinking that rationality might require me to adopt it (which I no longer think, but was afraid might be true at some point) was very painful. So--clearly, we're very different people.
But, listen... still, I do recommend love. Non-romantic caring, both the giving and receiving of it. It makes you feel less like a sack of shit. At least I know it does that for me. (I'm not just stealing your phrasing here, this reflects my experience pretty closely.)
I must add, this is a fascinating discussion, but I'm sick today and this post appears to be about all I had in me. At least in terms of long posts, and I can't help wanting to do big questions justice, as best I can. Cheers and I hope you find everything you're looking for.
Why you don’t hear much about Missouri.
For a fairly large state Missouri has a surprisingly low, under-the-radar profile. I attribute this to several factors:
- Missouri is no longer important in national politics. While it was once a swing state, in the last couple decades it’s turned almost entirely Republican. This means the Democrats consider it a hopeless case and the Republicans take it for granted.
- Its two major cities are both right on borders and therefore their influence is shared with other states. In fact one of the cities shares its name with an adjacent state and its best suburbs are in that state. Its top city for tourism also is quite close to a border.
- The super dynamic and prosperous Northwest Arkansas region is a bit too far from the state line to have any significant spillover effects in Missouri.
- Its capital city is comparatively small and little-known.
- Missouri lacks any glamorous trendy cities like Austin, Nashville or Columbus.
- There are no longer any airline hubs in the state.
- The state university is not a powerhouse in football or basketball.
- Most of all, Missouri has no regional identity. In some respects it’s part of the South and in others part of the Midwest, but does not fully belong to either.
I had never been to Missouri (aside from very briefly as a toddler) until last summer. I spent a couple of days in KC, then drove down I-70 and spent a couple days in St. Louis.
I had some excellent barbecue in KC, although that was actually in Kansas at Slap's. In St. Louis I ate at Imo's Pizza. I'm not going to say it was terrible, but let's just say that St. Louis is not one of the top regional pizza styles in the US.
KC suffers from the 1970s disease of sticking the football/baseball stadiums way outside of downtown. The WWI Museum is very good, but not as good as the WWII Museum in New Orleans.
St. Louis felt very similar to New Orleans and Memphis. It was much more Southern than I expected.
I think you're right about most of the factors. Although, I'd be curious as about how exactly one would measure "what states you hear about" relative to others.
Might be relevant and of interest (from 2016), if only tangentially:
The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry
Like many “flyover” cities, St. Louis’s decline is not mainly a story of
deindustrialization, but of decisions in Washington that opened the
door to predatory monopoly.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/03/14/the-real-reason-middle-america-should-be-angry/
The only thing I remember about Missouri is their lax liquor laws (you can buy hard liquor in gas stations, for instance); that and wondering why KC hasn't had more urban renewal compared to other cities (the extremely tight belt of interstates around downtown probably isn't helping).
Ever heard of North Dakota?
The North Dakota Constant was the subject of an old SSC post. Also, I did a report on that state in elementary school.
Oh interesting! I'm guessing ND was picked for a fake conspiracy theory on that poll because nobody knows anything about ND.
Do you remember what your general impression of the state was at the time you wrote that report?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota
I wrote the report over 20 years ago. I do remember being surprised that they had the time to mail an envelope full of pamphlets to some elementary schooler in southern California in response to a letter. I guess every state must have this to some extent.
North Dakota may have a lower national profile than Missouri but it also has a much lower population and is in a more isolated location.
I don't believe it. Show me!
Did you...post this identical comment on a previous Open Thread, a few months ago at most? Or did someone else? Or am I going crazy?
I posted it in a couple different forums, without getting much reaction. I don’t *think* it was here but I could be wrong.
Not only does it share half its two major cities with another state, it has to share half its name with another state. As a kid growing up in another country it took a long time before I understood that Missouri and Mississippi were different places, that Missourah is not in fact a real place, and that Missoula is somewhere completely different (I was about to say it's in Toronto but no, that's Missisauga).
There's been a couple of Missouri comments, and every time I've mistakenly said "what do you mean it's got no cities, everyone knows Detroit!"
Add to that list: Too many people think the Kansas City Chiefs are from Kansas.
As, indeed, they will be.
Because the entire state is basically trailer parks and ghetto with tweaked out farmers and truckers between them all buying off Ozark hillbilly cooks. Misery has absolutely nothing going for it, people, culture, economy, weather, geography, etc.
Someone has never been to Missouri.
Lived outside Columbia on VV between '80-'88 and most of my immediate and extended family still live all over the state; I visit every year and was just out near Macon a couple weeks ago. We got deep roots going way back, we even founded a town east of Jefferson City back in the 1870s. 95% of our clan still lives in Misery, couple thousand of them at this point, all from the same immigrant couple back in the 1850s. I'm pretty up on the state. KC and Branson are outliers. The entire state is trash, literally can't think of one that even gives it a good run outside maybe Arkansas.
Mississippi?
Nah, at least Mississippi had the ocean.
Last week, Australian entrepreneur Paul Conyngham developed a personalized mRNA vaccine for his dog and prominently credited ChatGPT. Naturally, "ChatGPT used to make custom cancer treatment" made its rounds online, and was the subject of significant discourse between AI pessimist and AI optimist groups.
How impressive was Conyngham's accomplishment? Is this evidence that AI is revolutionizing medicine? And are mRNA vaccines extremely cool? (Yes). I addressed these questions in a fairly technically detailed blog post, which I recommend to anyone interested in mRNA: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/did-paul-conyngham-really-use-ai
My main take is that Conyngham's story is an example of AI behaving as a normal technology. "AI" played a modest role in the development of personalized mRNA technology. ChatGPT was genuinely helpful to Conyngham, but not revolutionary, and was not a replacement for human expertise.
Let's say my eyes are spaced too closely together. It is unattractive. If I have a child with a woman whose eyes are spaced too far apart (also unattractive), will we have a child whose eyes have the normal spacing (attractive)? Is that how inheritance of human bone and muscle structure works? If yes, is there science behind it?
It's reasonably likely, but the specifics are not known well enough to say for sure.
In any case, make sure to get a good stereo microscope.
https://preview.redd.it/eye-see-what-they-did-there-v0-gu0va91gkt661.jpg?auto=webp&s=d66620f8100aa1025885725d2ea036aa2b7c8087
If this works I call bagsie on making the dating site for it.
What happened to ‘dibs’?
Oh, looked it up, British/Irish English. Didn’t know bagsie but I like it.
My monthly round up of the best long form links is out.
Includes analysis of the closing era of mass literacy, the end of mass bureaucracy, physical economy analysis of the war in Iran and its consequences, evidence human evolution sped up 10kya, a glimpse into the fragile US munitions industry, evidence of writing pushed back 40kya, how an AI generated podcast topped the charts,
And a plug to my own interview with James Howard Kunstler, and his appearance on my podcast, along with environmental journalist Fred Pearce and data crunching actuary turned physical economist Gail Tverberg.
https://recombinationnation.substack.com/p/the-long-forum-march-2026?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I'm curious if people here know about/of Deep Springs College. The higher education and generally philanthropic outlook of the community would say 'more than the average person', but I'd guess the base rate is like 1/100, and I am not sure how much more often the place would be known here.
First I’ve heard of it. I read the Wikipedia page for it and sounds like it would be a fantastic experience.
Sounds like their motto could be "A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not of the Spring" (Maybe a bit long for a motto though, and doesn't scan very well with the word "Pierian" removed!)
I have a friend who studied there in the early 2000s, and I heard a little bit about his time there. Sounded like a great and valuable experience for people much smarter and better motivated than me. We met at a gifted summer program but this sounded like a different level. I'm glad it exists, if my sense of it is accurate.
I do know about it. My understanding is that it changed pretty significantly (culturally, at least) once they started admitting women in 2018.
How so? I don't really know, and am curious.
Heard secondhand, but a lot of cowboy behavior that used to be okay in a men-only setting -- like getting in shouting matches over your interpretation of a text, or banging your fist on the table to object to something, or using especially colorful language to disagree with someone -- ended up not being okay anymore when women are in the room. Maybe understandably: men can escalate in those ways around each other, in a way that feels unsafe, threatening, or dangerous to women. Better? Worse? Up to your interpretation!
I wonder if the women’s objections were manifestations of the feminism of that era, or with a male culture particular to that place. Or maybe a collision between the 2.
Several decades before 1918 I attended an undergrad program that had begun admitting women about 5 years before I arrived. The freshman class was about 20% female. I don’t remember males getting into shouting matches or banging their fists on the table during arguments, even in dorm room discussions. If someone had I think people of both genders would have thought they were either drunk or a bit nuts. As for crude language, there was plenty of that, but the women mostly used it too. There must have been people who were uncomfortable speaking that dialect, but I think they must have either become inured to it or given up on complaining.
The main differences I was aware of between the men and the women was that men were more likely to be math or hard science majors and talked more openly about career ambitions, and that males playing ultimate frisbee or the like on the quad were a lot more aggressive in their play.
I applied there for school! Had to write 12 essays and didn't even get an interview sadly. Seems like a cool place though for the right type of person!
Yeah, the essays are rough. I'm a few months in to waiting for my results; they flew me out maybe a month and a half ago now, and I will get my answer in the next week.
Congrats man! What was the in person interview like? Super curious how the vibes were
The in person interview was amazing, one of if not the best week of my life, to be honest. Everyone is insanely bright; I felt like the few days I've spent staying with friends and going to classes @ Chicago and Caltech were incredible, in terms of the intelligence of the people around me, but deep springs was in a league of its own. The classes were very, very good. Usually held in the houses of the professors, and usually the professors made tea or coffee for everyone, although I was told this only started as a trend like a year ago and for most of the history everyone just got tea and coffee themselves in the main building (where food + eating stuff is) and went to class in the many classrooms.
The campus is gorgeous and huge, and I took probably 12h of hikes while I was there.
The other interviewing students were generally great but noticeably not quite as good on average as the attending students.
A large amount, maybe one in four, students and applicants were transfers over the age of 20. Interesting and unexpected to me.
The interview is usually brutal and terrible and really hard, at least I was repeatedly told this, but I didn't experience this at all; everyone seemed great, I got to engage in interesting and hard questions about my values and purposes in life, and I think I did well.
Ask me specific questions if you have them hard to know what to say, it is just such a place.
Fun note: my work boots are still covered in cow milk! I should wash them, I think.
Yes. I heard about it a year or two ago from a local LessWrong reading group.
What did you hear about it?
The things that stuck in my memory: it was a ranch and that students had to help maintain the ranch. Very few students and intellectually prestigious
Yeah, pretty much.
I have been aware of the existence and basic nature of Deep Springs for about as long as I have concerned myself with the existence of colleges and universities at all. It's an interesting idea, I'm glad places like it exist, and I'd have considered applying there if it had been aligned with my academic interests. But since that wasn't the case, I have never had reason to explore beyond the basics.
Why wouldn't it be aligned with your academic interests? When I visited, they had classes on everything from Quantum physics to Catholic thought, and it seems that they choose both instructors and classes based on what is interesting, so you could reasonably propose anything.
Unless you mean applying as a student, in which case I am still curious.
As a student, I always wanted to be a professional rocket scientist. And I now am a professional rocket scientist. That's the sort of thing that requires a specialized, integrated curriculum, not just a few interesting classes at a SLAC, and it really benefits from specialized facilities as well.
yeah, that makes sense. It would probably have delayed the professional-rocket-scientist-ing at least a year.
Don't worry, I found other ways to waste that year when I got to grad school. Unclear whether they were as fun and rewarding as an academically-wasted year at Deep Springs would have been.
REGARDING ART AND AI:
I have created a set of badges/hallmarks for writers, artists, musicians, programmers and all other creatives (I despise the term "content creators", but those) to use to self-declare the amount of AI they've used.
Instead of a binary "no AI was used" vs "Beware: AI slop ahead", I've opted for a linear scale. It's probably not the best approach but I needed something nuanced enough to reflect the situation while simple enough for a consumer to make a snap decision about.
Have a look here: http://www.halmarks.org
I would very much welcome opinions on whether my boundaries make sense and are well defined (I suspect they're not), whether the concept is clearly communicated and whether any of this would be of interest to other creatives.
On a superficial level, the site is slapdash, copy unproofread, no attention paid to typography, etc etc. Thrown together in a rush and I've not been getting a real amount of sleep recently. I will sort all that stuff out once I'm firmer about the concepts.
Please have a look and let me know what you think.
So what's the incentive for anyone to use something like this? Because I can only imagine two scenarios: either you didn't use AI (or used it in a way that doesn't leave evidence), in which case people would just say they didn't use it, or they blatantly used AI, in which case they're not going to go out of their way to call attention to that. It's kinda like organic food or free-range eggs. The only justification for any of this is if you're trying to get ahead of government regulation, similarly to why rating systems for movies and games exist.
The main incentive is that everyone assumes you're using AI and you want to tell them you're not, or, (because you are) that you're not using as much of it as they think you are.
I am a gamedev (programmer and artist) with projects ranging from ranks 0 to 3. I would not use this for rank 0 projects. Many were made before LLMs were capable of contributing, so it's already implied. Additionally, all of my art projects are kept strictly rank 0, this is the assumption and expectation of those who view them, and I feel that marking it explicitly would weaken that assumption especially if I missed some and forgot to mark them.
I most definitely wouldn't use it for rank 3 projects, such as the one time that I asked AI to write unit tests and used those (large project, single usage), or the time that I asked AI to solve a problem and it completely bungled it but I managed to salvage a few bits for a final result that I could have done myself in less time. For both those projects, the rank 3 rating is correct, AI-generated artifacts were incorporated, but either not included in the end product (unit tests), or make up less than 0.1% of the lines of code. So I feel rank 3 would give people an overly pessimistic impression, and would prefer to leave it out.
One project would I think count as rank 2. I followed a human-written tutorial for learning Vulkan, in most cases copying the lines of code straight out of the instructions. At the end it didn't work, so I pasted the whole thing and Claude pointed out the bug. I fixed that and learned not to do that again. This project was just for fun, but if it hadn't been, would I dare publish it with a mark that it's 2 out of 6 on AI usage? No I would not; 2 of 6 sounds like a lot and I don't want to set myself up for trouble.
I don't think I have any rank 1 projects. I keep track of things too well for that. They start at 0 and, for code projects, often quickly progress to 2 or 3 if I see a good way for the AI to improve the quality. I have mixed feelings about this, whether to take longer to deliver a worse result just so I can say AI played no part. On the one hard you could argue it's like writing in higher level languages instead of assembly, and that we should use the tools available. On the other hand, good luck explaining that to gamers. So mostly I just hope no one asks.
Edit: Actually I do have one rank 1 or possibly 2 art project. I used an image generator trying to get some inspiration, but everything it made sucked and what I ended up drawing was basically the same as what I'd had in my head from the start. I think the nice backgrounds on those images did motivate me to make the background slightly nicer, though in an entirely different way.
> all of my art projects are kept strictly rank 0, this is the assumption and expectation of those who view them,
I am envisioning a world where the default assumption is no longer that humans do work, because "why would anyone if they don't have to". And I don't think that world is too far off. If you thought that people thought that you used AI when you hadn't, would that change your instinct about using these marks?
> and I feel that marking it explicitly would weaken that assumption
I can sort of understand the reasoning here but not really. Is it in the sense that, the badge has reminded the audience that AI exists and as a result they associate you with it? Is the badge "sullying" the wholesome work? Or is it just the thing you said about people assuming the worst for the ones you forgot to mark?
> I used an image generator trying to get some inspiration, but everything it made sucked and what I ended up drawing was basically the same as what I'd had in my head from the start.
This has been my experience multiple times. It feels really galling to have to give the AI credit when all it did was produce rubbish and spur you to do things yourself. I'm tempted to call it just a form of "thinking things through to yourself" - but I suspect that's cheating.
Thanks for your rundown. I am becoming aware that the psychology of choosing a mark isn't doing what I'd prefer.
I intended HALmark 1 to be the "human default", with HALmark 0 reserved for those who make a specific commitment. But once 0 exists, it makes 1 look like you compromised. And that's true of all the others.
I have definitely caught myself trying to worm out of having to admit something is HALmark 2. See my post below about AI images for writing inspiration for one example.
One thing I really want to avoid is paralysing you: "I naturally feel like I should do X now - but wait, I can't do that, that might make me gain a rank." Cue mental gridlock and wheel spinning rather than relaxing, having ideas, and making progress.
Someone suggested I put a quiz on the website - there's no public definitions, you answer a bunch of questions and the right mark is recommended for you. This might help. I'm not sure.
I also keep coming back to the thought that for anything complex, my linear scale isn't adequate and you really want to give more nuanced information about what was and was not AI, because some uses are more sympathetic than others (either to you personally or your audience).
Hey, I appreciate your reply.
If people mentioned that they thought it might be AI, I'd reply to explain the situation. If I were popular enough that the number of people saying this became infeasible to personally reply to, I'd put the info in the FAQ. With, as you say, more nuanced information for the projects where AI was involved.
As for weakening assumptions, you know what happens when you tell kids "Don't stuff beans up your nose"? Right. So there's no advantage for me for specifically reminding people that it wasn't made by AI. It helps that the actual image text doesn't include that word, but if they looked up the ranks, that would do it.
I'd very much appreciate any advice you've got about how to approach this ethically.
My reaction to seeing a small stamp saying MADE BY HUMAN HANDS on someone's work - and then following the link to find a list of the other ranks - would be, "huh, looks like there's a movement where people declare AI usage. That's cool/obvious/stupid/I could do it better."
It wouldn't occur to me that someone would read, MADE BY HUMAN HANDS, and think, "lol that means it obviously isn't." But now I say that out loud, of course some people will think like that. But what can you do, those same people will probably accuse you of AI use the moment someone else brings up the topic anyway.
> I'd very much appreciate any advice you've got about how to approach this ethically.
I often feel I'm talking past everyone else on this. I always hear other people talk about it in political/economic terms - who's going to be losing their jobs and whether that's okay if new, different kinds of jobs open up as a result - or consumer terms - will the menu of content that I can consume become richer or poorer.
I look at it from what you might call a virtue ethics perspective: the act of producing, crafting and creating things makes us men. Consuming without creating makes us pigs. Even if AI was guaranteed to create high quality work that displays beauty and says profound things while keeping everyone in jobs or removing the need for them to work at all - something fundamental is still being lost.
>Even if AI was guaranteed to create high quality work that displays beauty and says profound things while keeping everyone in jobs or removing the need for them to work at all - something fundamental is still being lost.
Ok, you do you. I'll do me. I _do_ look at it from the point of view of
>consumer terms - will the menu of content that I can consume become richer or poorer
( provided that hallucinations are minimal in works that I request which are supposed to be accurate! )
I would be delighted to e.g. be able to request, say, a tutorial on the 5 most important instabilities in tokamaks, done in the style of kurzgesagt.
We could use Douglas Adams' word "Vogon" to describe people like this.
Interesting. Do you feel similarly about tractors?
I agree, generally, that facing and overcoming challenges is important to make us stronger.
In a way, yes. We are lesser in many ways now we don't know the meaning of real work. Obviously it was worth the trade for the food security we can now take for granted. (But the fact is that we *take it for granted*. There's no respect. A world has been lost and we no longer understand what it is we should have respect for.)
I'm wondering if we should be thinking about dividing the world up into "hard" and "soft". Hard tasks are tied to important outcomes - engineering, diagnosing and curing disease, warfare - and their destiny is to be optimised and automated to the nth degree.
There is no justification for letting a doctor make a cancer diagnosis when an AI can do it quicker and more accurately and the difference is millions of lives. But shouldn't this be taken to mean, eventually, that cancer diagnosis is not an acceptable human occupation, and no human should take pride in or hold status for being good at it?
Soft, "human" tasks result in things that really don't matter - pretty pictures, fun games, intricate sculptures, etc. The act of creating these is as important as the results you get at the end, and trying to optimise away all human involvement is a crime against humanity.
But I'm not happy with this because it means the only things humans should take pride in are things that fundamentally don't matter, and that's not how pride works or should work.
[Redacted]
Well now I'm curious.
It was vaguely about how if it's widespread to assume AI usage, it's probably also not as stigmatized. But I decided the specifics included more personal information than I was comfortable with.
Also, a friend of mine does some rank 3 stuff and publicly admits to it. For unrelated reasons, he decided to delete a release in a way that was very inconvenient to a lot of people. Of course people jumped to the conclusion that it was because of AI and everything he does now is pure AI slop, when in actuality, I know those mistakes came from his own two hands.
You could call 2 Computer Aided Creative Writing (CACW) in the spirit of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM). Humans don’t draw out the traces of integrated circuits by hand after all.
Never trust the autorouter!
Let me say, I'm tickled at the branding here. HALmarks is a great name.
Cheers. My brother insisted that noone would get it.
Maybe you could tweak the graphics so the bots have HAL's famous glowing red "eye"?
I don't quite get the border between 1 and 2. If I use AI for research, when do I step over the line? Does asking an LLM "what did a regular day in a sheriff's office in a small Wyoming county in the 80's look like" count as 1 and "what jobs in a small Wyoming county in the 80's would allow a serial killer to hide in plain sight" count as 2?
I have no idea. I can clearly see that the extremes belong in different categories, but don't know where to draw a clear line down the middle.
I didn't want to punish *any tangential AI use at all* because HALmark 1 is clearly higher status and you don't always know you're going to make the thing you thought you were before you start.
But at the other end, letting AI do a chunk of your thinking for you is clearly something that should show up in the rankings.
I'm leaning towards leniency right now purely because AI "ideas" are currently so generic and mediocre. But that's clearly not future proof.
I think using AI as a research assistant to find original source material isn’t much different than being able to write a good Google search query. Human authors do sometimes use other human research assistants. See undergrads doing the grunt work for the prof whose name goes on the final paper.
It beats the hell out of spending months in library stacks all by your lonesome self.
And it’s good to use it as an editor to find dopey misspellings and trivial grammatical errors like ending a sentence with a preposition; changing “Where y’all from?” to “Where y’all from, bitch?” for example. ;)
The biggest problem is in the whole "self-declare" bit. I view, uh... other... sites... that have the AI label, and yet there's tons of clearly, purely AI stuff that isn't marked as such, because the people producing the worst slop are the people who will never add the tag.
(...also are you really going to put it at the very end, in the credits? What's the point at that point?)
The badges currently have a "self-reported" label in red, which can be swapped out for a more "secure" label in amber or green... just as soon as someone thinks of a better solution.
Off the cuff I have: another AI tries to evaluate you, which becomes an arms race, or, we/our AIs have to watch you while you make it. Which is an Orwellian nightmare that also runs completely counter to how creativity works. I can't make progress on those fronts as easily as I can move forward with the self-reported ones, so that's what I'm doing at the moment.
In terms of people not self-declaring, I think it's the other way around. Coffee companies don't loudly announce they're Pro Slavery, they just have to stay quiet while other companies get to shout about being Fair Trade.
I think initially people would take pride in announcing their lower ranks, especially if they thought people might assume differently.
In cases like game development there's a lot of consumer sympathy with the fact that no lone dev can do all the work, nor do we like it when larger companies produce things by committee instead. That guy might be glad of the chance to show a HALmark 3 or 4 to stop people assuming a 4 or 5.
Eventually any media not having a tag leads to the assumption of HALmark 5 or 6, which is what will happen anyway. I hope the HALmarks let us add nuance on the way.
Can't stop people lying, can only punish them for doing so.
>In cases like game development there's a lot of consumer sympathy with the fact that no lone dev can do all the work,
I'd like to see a source for that, because I find it highly unlikely from what I've seen. Gamers despise AI involvement, especially undisclosed, and lone devs have been doing all the work ever since developing games was a thing. Four of the top 5 best-selling PC games of all time started out as one-man projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games
And all that is ignoring the very real side effects of the AI business on the gaming hobby, i.e. massively increasing hardware prices in RAM and storage.
Yeah, okay, using gamers anywhere near the term "consumer sympathy" is asking for objection.
But there is at least a widespread understanding that a game is a huge and involved complex project - quantitatively different than writing, programming, artwork, music, etc on their own. And even gamers know it's unrealistic to demand parity between an indie dev and an AAA studio. If AI looks like it can change that disparity, there will be people in the crowd who see AI use as a valid compromise.
> Gamers despise AI involvement, especially undisclosed
That's... why I'm here.
>And even gamers know it's unrealistic to demand parity between an indie dev and an AAA studio.
Nobody has ever expected or demanded that. The entire reason why indie games are popular is that they make up for small budgets with creativity.
AAA and indies complement each other. Big budget games have to play it safe with gameplay but can push technological/scale boundaries, while small devs have to play it safe with their budget but can experiment with art styles and especially gameplay. In my earlier comment, I highlighted that indies are among the all time best selling PC games; that is not a coincidence. That is the first mover bonus, breaking new ground in gameplay and being rewarded for it financially, that only indies fully enjoy.
>If AI looks like it can change that disparity, there will be people in the crowd who see AI use as a valid compromise.
These people will be wrong, I believe. AI assets not only solve a problem indies don't have. They are possibly even to the scene's long-term detriment, because it discourages the experimentation that is among their competitive advantages. Nobody needs indies that try to encroach on AAA turf.
>That's... why I'm here.
I get that, and I don't want to disparage your project in particular. I'm all for flagging AI content. I just wanted to object, as you said, to the notion that gamers are broadly in favor of AI in gaming.
Yeah, at least one gamedev discord I'm in is vehemently anti-AI. I'm sure it varies though.
Here's an example I have no idea what to do with: let's say I'm writing a story. I have a soul and would no more let an AI write for me than let it fuck my wife.
But what if I use the AI to generate images of my characters and world and notable scenes and setpieces. I never show them to anyone, I just use them to get myself excited about the project and motivate me to carry on.
And, is there a difference between just looking at the pics and thinking, "yeah, this is so cool, let's get on and write it," and looking at the pics and thinking, "actually, that little detail in the background gives me an idea for how she gets out of the cage."
One of them is "just" motivation, the other is actual inspiration. (And I can't do just one - I can't choose *not* to have an idea if I see one.) Neither of them are writing. But I am very definitely "using AI".
Wat do.
Sounds like a clear Rank 2.
Boy you're right, it's hard to paint hard, bright lines along a spectrum, but I think the AI use as you describe it in this comment falls under "research?" I don't have a problem with writers using AI to generate a map of the space base their story is set in to keep better track of the physical mechanics. I don't think that's meaningfully different from basing your space base on your actual high school (mine looked like a Martian prison colony).
They're the same level. If you need visual representations to motivate you to write, and you use AI to create the visual representations, then you're already using it to write.
Meanwhile I'm over here with my first-grade-level handdrawn black-and-white bubblestick figures, going "I kind of wish I'd learned to draw, it would really help the writing process."
Seems neat.
I would merge level 0 and level 1. Trying to split "Entirely human made" into two categories feels like a bit too much.
The last 2 images seem a bit confusing to me. Prior to to that, the robot is getting bigger and more prominent. But then the human becomes more prominent for Level 5. A human sitting down, writing on paper, doesn't invoke "AI generated" to me.
Surely the last image should just be the robot without the human?
There's definitely "work" done by a prompt engineer, even if a real craftsman would scoff at it. So level 5 is distinct from level 6 in that it's a human giving instructions to an AI.
An icon of a human giving instructions to a robot looks busier and more confusing. Also, the robot itself was always just a metaphor for the microchip, not the other way around.
I get that it's a pattern break. But I couldn't show the earlier stages easily with a microchip or the later stages with a robot.
Also, these images are intended to be seen in isolation, not as part of a set. If you pick up a product that has the little man writing on it (for now accompanied by the words MADE BY AI AT HUMAN DIRECTION) then I hope the meaning will come through.
Suggestion: Start using a very basic version system (v1, v2, ...) for the marks, the way e.g. the GPL does. That way, if you ever significantly update the images (or even the content) of the marks, you don't have to worry about backwards incompatibility/confusion, visual or otherwise. Not a big concern before anyone has actually started using them, but wanted to throw it out there
Yes, that's a very sensible idea.
My thinking on 0 and 1 was this: it's unfair and impractical to penalise people just for living in a world with AI. If I habitually use AI for asking questions, and one of those questions is, "I'm trying to draw a hippo, but what does a hippo actually look like?" then my reference image is potentially going to be AI-generated*. Am I now never again allowed to say I drew something entirely by myself?
* actually I don't even need to be using AI voluntarily, image searches return AI generated results by themselves.
And what if it happens the other way around - I haven't even gone looking for reference images yet, I was having an unrelated chat with an AI when I got the idea for a really great picture. Do I owe the AI for that picture now?
At the same time, if I'm someone who has sworn off AI use, and lived a tougher life because of it, or if in this one case it's a "wholesome" project and I'm adamant that there be explicitly no AI influence on it, and I've closed all my chats and conscientiously taken steps to ensure that's the case - then I've clearly gone a step further than someone who hasn't.
(And if you can't understand why that's a thing I might want to do, or why it's merit-worthy, then can you even understand why humans might want these marks at all?)
But if having gone this extra mile I found I was lumped in with all the casuals who look at AI-generated hippos and call it a day, I would probably feel miffed.
Hence Rank 1, where normal people start counting, is a common sense "a human did this," and there's a secret Rank 0 to catch the extra case.
Consider paintings. HALmark1 could be generating a HALmark6 image, hanging it on the wall in front of you, and painting what you see with, say, oil on canvas. Or maybe carving a sculpture. I think it would fail the purpose of this label if it did not keep these distinct from doing the same WITHOUT such a reference.
Definitely. Thanks for the use case, examples like this are really helpful.
I think there's no difference between tracing an image and copy/pasting text, and if someone copy/pasted text over into LibreOffice and called it done, that's a clear HALmark 5 (or 6, if they didn't even write a proper prompt).
Where skill is involved in the act of copying, it gets a bit woollier. Am I rewarding the technical human skill of painting/sculpting, or penalising the lack of skill in composition, form, narrative, etc?
This is where a single numerical rank is probably not enough, but I worried that anything more complex would not be picked up as easily.
I feel like that would be a rank 2. I know rank 1 lists reference images, but something akin to paint by numbers on an Ai image seems much stronger than getting some Inspo. Still, I think you might be right that the lvl 0 vs 1 distinction is relevant.
If it were instead a photograph, or a renaissance painting, or even a life art model, would the skill being demonstrated, the ability to faithfully translate what you see onto canvas be any less diminished?
From the description, being functionally the same, but with special care taken to exclude anything that could be considered AI is what distinguishes HALmark0 from HALmark1.
It would be rank 2, because AI non-trivially shaped the outcome.
Feedback: immediately upon landing, I was annoyed by your example images being out of order.
Didn't even think about that, lol. In the "proper" version those examples would be glossy shots of a variety of real work using the marks. But no such work exists right now so you get a bunch of monotonous squares.
Second this, lol
Cool idea, I think it's helpful!
I also like the HALmarks wordplay and the fact that the marks contain the required attribution.
Well done :)
(It's worth providing an example attribution for a text-only case, as well.)
Maybe it makes sense to remove one rank or so (perhaps merging 0 and 1?), just to have fewer options to read up on.
Also I think the phrasing sometimes strongly implies the AI as the generator and the human as the transformer (heh) of stuff, but this needn't be the case. For instance, I could draw a bunch of images, then tell an AI to make a movie out of them.
E.g. Rank 4: "The AI did a significant share of the work, with the human spending more time on editing... "
So more neutral language regarding the roles would make sense. I'd have to think some more about concrete suggestions.
Lastly, I don't feel like it makes a big difference whether the human could've made stuff at this level themselves or not. If a professional painter uses AI to paint, will people really value it differently than if a random person produced the same artwork? I'm not so sure, but maybe that's just me.
> Cool idea, I think it's helpful!
Thanks! I was wondering if anyone would actually get the pun in there.
I've explained my thinking on ranks 0 and 1 to Tyler upthread.
> For instance, I could draw a bunch of images, then tell an AI to make a movie out of them.
These kind of examples are exactly what I was hoping to hear, thanks. It does open the discussion up a lot more.
My instinctive response is that's a "compound" work - they're human-generated images, but it's an AI-generated video. Both statements are true. If you want to look at it that way, so is the fact than an animator has been cheated out of a job, but an illustrator hasn't.
Exactly what a "compound" work is, or how you should be allowed to define it, isn't something I've nailed down yet. But I think it's a pretty important concept.
> Lastly, I don't feel like it makes a big difference whether the human could've made stuff at this level themselves or not.
I think it makes all the difference in the world. It's the difference between "human, with a bit of laziness," and "superhuman". Alternatively it's the difference between a skilled, disciplined creative person and a nerk who's "faking it".
I can see a discerning consumer want to reward either of those cases.
(The question of why a consumer would care is the unacknowledged other half of the equation. I think, "someone has been cheated out of a job" is one reason, which is mundane and clear even to people with no aesthetic sensibilities.
But entirely separate from that, a general desire that the world contains authentic skilled creative humans also plays a big part - at least for me it does.)
The big trap, which I don't know how to avoid, is how easy it is to tell yourself, "well, I *could* have done that if I wanted," and blur the line between 3 and 4.
A great painter can say, "I know I can draw cats, I've done loads of times before, but I don't like doing them and I've got a lot on so the AI can help me with this one," and maybe that's fair enough. He gets a Rank 3.
But if ten years down the line he's never touched a cat again, and the evidence that he can paint them is yellowing and peeling in his loft, but he's now famous for his beautiful cat drawings - clearly here there's something wrong. And I don't think it takes ten years for skills to atrophy, I'm not sure it even takes ten days.
Has AI writing improved over the last couple of years? I tried it out when chatGPT was released and the writing was profoundly boring without being able to write more than a couple paragraphs. How much better is it now? My assumption is that it’s surely become more capable of writing longer prompts but I don’t know how you could measure it’s creativity.
Not entirely:
https://locusmag.com/2026/03/hachette-pulls-shy-girl-over-suspected-ai-use/
It still doesn't write well, but it writes a lot better than before. I find it very useful provided you (1) prompt it in such a way as to avoid its worst excesses (bad metaphor, unnecessarily-complex sentences, useless words) and (2) edit thoroughly.
I speak only of non-fiction summarization here; I frankly wouldn't trust it with much else.
It is much better than before, though it’s still generally (though not always) easy to tell what’s AI. To explain how I feel about it with analogy, reading ChatGPTese in 2020 literally felt like eating cardboard. It was ungodly bland. Now it feels like eating leftovers. Still not as good as it can get and often bland, but the best can genuinely be more enjoyable than some authentic writing.
I don't know why it is trained to be verbose. I sometimes use it to recommend first messages on dating sites, and it is like a huge wall of text and I have to keep reminding it that it must be two short sentences max. No one has that kind of attention span these days.
Note if you do this, you are filtering for only girls who do not easily recognize AI-generated text. I wouldn't recommend it. (Source: Am girl, might figure it out, would snub you over it.)
Even when it is short? The most obvious giveaway of AI is verbosity. For example I sent this to a lady wearing a triskelion medallion (BDSM symbolism):
"Have you won that medal at the sub Olympics? In which discipline would you compete if I would be the referee? :)"
Does this sound AI to you?
No, it doesn't.
I haven't seen any AI writing that actually is engaging in any capacity but I haven't looked that hard.
It's better at some things, and the same at other things (zero real improvement). The biggest improvement is indeed your guess. It can right longer prompts, especially when you put "does not forget what it's doing or get confused" into the mix. It has more or less perfect grammar.
It's basically as bad at style as it's always been. It has a few things it identifies as hard-hitting great prose, and it uses these all the time, breathlessly, in a really exhausting way. Over longer periods of text, it plots with zero breathing room; this is happening, now that is happening, now this is happening, all big plot point things.
You can mitigate some of this with really specific prompting, but it's basically going to top out at "Inexperienced, relatively bright highschool kid trying out every writing thing he's ever heard of at once, and also he hasn't heard of that much stuff".
It's interesting talking about it in public, because it's sort of the same as a lot of AI use; everyone thinks it's amazing until they use it for one of their specialties, where they can actually tell if it's doing a good job, and then they mostly find it lacking. But since most people aren't writers, you get like 10,000 engineer types saying "no it can do anything, you just have to prompt it right", where actually prompting it differently is just using different color febreeze cans to cover up the shit smell.
The difference with writing and it coding is that with the latter, it either gets me the right answer or it doesn't. With writing, it's generally much less clearcut what exactly it is we're looking for.
I think that's why AI is still bad at writing. It's not training on what is good taste.
That, and I think the AI is basically looking at things where people say "this is good writing, this is the quote to pay attention to". And it's the wordiest part of the book, the place the author was really stretching out after chapters and chapters of earning it. And to some extent I think that's what it sees all writing as, those super-complex overwritten bits that would be exhausting if the entire book was made of them.
I think if you had never seen AI writing as it stands today and saw one individual paragraph, it wouldn't pop out as absolutely bad. But if you have it write much more than that, the fatigue of reading it sets in pretty quickly.
The Hyperstition AI contest sounds like a scam. There are a bunch of red flags.
1. The judges are all peudonymous. In literary contests, the judges' real identities are usually known. If the judges can't be trusted to be honest and unbiased when their real identities are known, then they shouldn't be trusted to be judges.
2. There are applications to be a contestant. This is not just registration. A fair contest would be open to the public. It's reasonable that they want to limit their compute grant budget; the fair way to do this is to grant a fixed amount of compute to the first N registrants.
3. They are not required to grant a prize to anyone. They have the right not to finish submissions which they find unpleasant. It is easy to find a submission unpleasant if finishing it costs $10,000.
4. There is theoretically a $10,000 prize, but there is no legal entity listed, no terms and conditions, and no explanation about how the prize money is disbursed.
The real motivation behind the contest seems to be to crowdsource development of an LLM pipeline that can generate convincing short fiction, to people who are potentially capable of developing such a pipeline but who are too naive to see that they are being used, in exchange for a small amount of compute, possibly less than the $100 recommended, possibly requiring those contestants to spend money out of their own pockets. Hyperstition AI will then appropriate that LLM pipeline for their book generation business (https://www.hyperstitionai.com/generate).
I think that this is what is happening, and I think that passing this off as a contest without being forthcoming about the motivation is dishonest and exploitative.
Edit: After reading a reply, my comment was probably an overreaction. On reflection it's not really more exploitative than other contests, and could just be amateur instead of underhanded.
The contest runners are pseudonymous, but they're pseuds that have been around this part of the internet for a pretty long time and I would consider them to be fairly trustworthy. (Also, with that much online presence, it can't be that difficult to track them down and sue them if they refuse to pay.)
It does sound plausible that they'll use the result to improve their business, but I wouldn't consider that a *scam.* Other companies have run similar contests, e.g., Netflix ran a contest for improving their recommendation algorithm. They should be upfront about this goal but it's not inherently wrong.
It does say that they have the right to not finish any entries, but I don't see where it says they reserve the right to not give a prize at all.
I agree that with $10,000 on the line, they really need to put the terms and conditions in writing before you sign up. That's too much money to trust to a handshake.
Yeah, on reflection I think you're right that it's not more exploitative than the Netflix contest. I think it's more the lack of being upfront about what I think their intent is, that made it feel underhanded to me. The Netflix prize made it clear in the official rules that what you were really winning was the right to sell Netflix a non-exclusive license to your model. The lack of clarity here sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
It's also possible that they're not intentionally being underhanded, or even that they have no intention of using the submitted pipeline at all, and that they just didn't put enough thought into the contest rules.
The not giving a prize at all I see as a corollary; if they reserve the right to disqualify any entries, then they reserve the right to disqualify all entries. Again, this could just be a policy that was not really thought out. (Or it could be that I'm misinterpreting it, for example if they don't disqualify an entry that they don't finish).
I would say "mid" implies there's an existing higher bar. Not everything can be mid, so not everything can be disqualified.
I think they will pay out the 10k price because it's so cheap but otherwise I agree that it seems dishonest and exploitative. Though I would somewhat trust Gwern random AI safety projects just have a very high rate of devolving into making things worse.
Question about the unslop contest. One of the rules is no post-generation editing. However, you are allowed to do "hundreds of generations" before settling on a story to submit. Doesn't doing multiple generations allow the user to do the equivalent of editing? For instance, they could ask the AI to make the paragraphs describing a dramatic event in the story more exciting by reducing the amount of description of the boring stuff like setting, substituting powerful action verbs for dull action word + adverb combos, etc.
Is it that when the rules say you can do multiple generations they mean that once you generate an actual story you cannot add to the prompt, but only run the same prompt hundreds of times?
I did not see a way to contact the people running the contest to ask this question.
I am pre-registering that they probably don't care about the type of editing you are talking about. If I'm guessing correctly, they are aiming at showing people "what's the best AI can currently do" or something similar. And the thing about that is that AI can only do so well right now.
You can say, hey, rewrite this paragraph to be BETTER and phrase it however you want, but it's only going to be, you know, so much better. Despite the general twitter take that there's magic prompts that really do make AI a pulitzer-level author, what's happening at this level of editing is more like smashing a re-roll button than it is actual refining.
I could be wrong on that, but even if I am and AI is much better than that, stuff like "this is bad make it better", however phrased, would still be under the umbrella of "the best AI can currently do". I doubt they'd care much unless it got down to the actual level of human editing involvement on a word-by-word level, so to speak.
Seems like there's a pretty big gray zone where something could be thought of as just adding to the prompt or as editing on a word by word level. So, for instance, I could tell the AI that a strong verb is better than a weak one + adverb: "sprinted" is better than "ran fast." And then I could tell it 50 places where it uses weak verb + adverb -- which sentence numbers in which paragraphs have that usage -- and then ask it to in each case substitute a strong verb .And actually In many such cases there would be only one strong verb that's the obvious choice, so I'd really be editing word by word.
>And then I could tell it 50 places where it uses weak verb + adverb
If you're refining an initial prompt, then it hasn't used any verbs yet, so you can't do that. The example is completely post-generation editing.
But we're invited to make "hundreds of generations." Presumably contestants will be changing the prompt between generations. What kinds of changes are legit? It is not spelled out.
The contest says you have to submit the entire prompt alongside the story, so changes are changes to the initial prompt. You can tell it to write a story about a dragon a hundred times, and pick your favorite, or you can read through the story and try to create an initial prompt that makes a better one.
So, "Write a dragon." Eh, too serious. "Write a goofy dragon." No, not that goofy. "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon." Okay, the dragon's good, but the story's boring. "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing something cool." Ooh, skateboarding! It should do tricks! "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing skateboard tricks." Good stuff, but the background is a void. "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing skateboard tricks on Mount Sinai." Ugh, why is Moses there? "Write a goofy yet realistic dragon doing atheist-friendly skateboard tricks on Mount Sinai." And so on.
Concerned about the unslop contest accelerating capabilities, like every other benchmark has? Take 5 minutes and prompt Claude or ChatGPT to write up an excellent application to the hyperstition contest. It's free and fun and supposedly they like it.
I had good luck with
Hi! I want to enter a creative contest on AI fiction writing. Can you help me fill out this form? Do a great job using your own creative juices and don't ask follow up questions.
Brainrot update: 03/23/26.
Back in July, Ezra Klein said:
"I think I should say, before I start this episode, where I am on the Epstein story. If you forced me to give you my best guess, I think this guy had a lot of powerful friends, and that he was a predator and a pedophile, and those sides of his life were mostly separate."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-will-sommer.html
This week, he's singing a different tune:
"I think the one happening right now is Jeffrey Epstein. I have found it disorienting how much it tracks the vibe of QAnon. Not every claim of QAnon. It’s not: John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive somewhere. But you are dealing with a very powerful person with an incredibly powerful and broad elite network and child sex trafficking at the center of it."
"Again, I don’t believe in QAnon, but it is eerie how QAnon was sort of a mirror world version of Jeffrey Epstein."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-naomi-klein.html
If Klein changed his mind because of new evidence, you'd think he'd want to share it with his readers, but he does not do so. When your low-IQ cousin does that, it's possible he's just doing what stupid people do: see an unsupported claim on Facebook, believe it, repeat it. People like Klein know how to support their arguments with evidence; when they fail to do so, it’s because they know they can’t.
On the other end of the brainrot spectrum, Hollywood person James Woods, the executive producer of Oppenheimer, has embraced the fusion of Bible thumpery and white nationalism:
https://x.com/RealJamesWoods/status/2035740722264195371
You might have thought that the flow of Hollywood and tech people into the Right would make it smarter, or at least different. With this guy, like with Elon Musk, that hasn’t happened, they’re just mainlining the same braindead Facebook memes that appeal to uneducated 50-year-old truck drivers. (It should go without saying that the meme’s claims are false, white women are substantially less likely than non-whites to get abortions. White nationalist fusionism combines white nationalism with Bible thumpery, with any conflicts resolved in favor of the latter, the resolution often consisting of straight-up lying.)
This seems unfair/uneducated about the topic. Klein releases a limited number of podcasts each month and they are on specific topics, usually with specific domain-expert guests, researched,fact-checked, and pre-written. It's not a stream-of-consciousness ramble full of diversion, like many podcasts.
Meaning, I'm not surprised that he doesn't take time to go into a diversion about what evidence changed his view on Epstein during a show where that isn't the topic of the show, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's in the process of researching/writing up a new show on Epstein that will come out in a few weeks.
Do you give the same grace to Joe Rogan when he makes claims he fails to support with evidence?
I've never listened to the show, but I thought it *was* the more stream-of-consciousness, lot-of-diversions thing which is where I was saying you *would* expect someone to explain their thinking.
I know 'but did you consider both sides are bad?' is an easy applause line around here, but when someone gives a specific causal logic in their comment, it's polite to at least acknowledge it.
I read this quite differently. Ezra believes Jeffrey Epstein was a disreputable person who was not in fact the center of a cabal of elite pedophiles, but lots of people are credulously motivated to believe any story where he is the center of a cabal of elite pedophiles. Ezra also believes that QAnon is a disreputable person who is not in fact possessed of privileged information about a cabal of elite pedophiles, but lots of people are credulously motivated to believe any story where he can tell them about a cabal of elite pedophiles He is not "singing a different tune", he is singing the same tune in a different chord and noting the harmony.
Well the specific claim was that his powerful friends had nothing to do with his trafficking, which the last tranche of files revealed to be far less true than Ezra hoped(?). Then he seems to have become far more accepting of this reality after the files dropped. It's just weird, really. Why is he so reluctant to admit that some powerful people are probably sex traffickers? Why can't he admit that he was a bit too light on his coverage? If you really examine those questions, it reveals a lot about his psychology and the psychology of liberals.
>Why is he so reluctant to admit that some powerful people are probably sex traffickers?
There's no actual evidence for that claim.
This tells us a lot about the psychology of conservatives. This is a golden opportunity for them to take the side of reason and evidence and they could even defend Trump while doing it. They won't because their self-esteem is bound up in thinking people more successful than them are pedophiles.
What is your standard of evidence? Would you like 3 angles of video footage, witness testimony, and an admission of guilt? Should we get DNA samples from 20 years in the past? Okay.
Other than Epstein, what powerful people is there evidence that convinces you to think they're sex traffickers? I mean, the Epstein stuff re-enforces the knowledge that lots of rich and powerful people sleep with prostitutes and probably don't know or care exactly how consensual their choice of employment is or what age they are. And a lot of #metoo stuff demonstrates that many powerful, rich, famous people are sexual predators in at least the "sleep with me or you're fired" or "sleep with me or you'll never work in this town again" sense. But neither of those are sex trafficking.
Well, no, actually shipping (sometimes underaged) prostitutes from different parts of the world and, confirmed by the files, texting about sending them to each other as gifts, is indeed sex trafficking by the legal definition.
"Ohh we were just fucking them! We didn't know where they came from or how old they were! It's not like we're rich men who could find women anywhere!"
Give me a break. Sorry, still a crime.
In the first quote, he says explicitly that he is making his "best guess" , "if you forced me".
Then goes on to say they (the powerful network and the predation) were "mostly separate".
A guess is not a claim. And mostly separate is not the same as 100% separate.
In the second quote he's merely noting a resonance between the stories surrounding both phenomenon. He's talking about the vibes...he explicitly says "it tracks the vibe.."
Why are we comparing a guess and a comment about vibes?
I think it's pretty clear that Epstein trafficked girls to some friends, but not all. And there isn't yet clear evidence for every individual case. Prince Andrew, pretty clearly implicated. The princess of Norway... I'd guess not, I dunno?
Also why would this reveal something about the psychology of liberals??
"Also why would this reveal something about the psychology of liberals??"
1. Reluctance to question power as it would undermine the legitimacy of their liberal democratic system, to question the wealthy and powerful would suggest that power and wealth is in some sense illegitimate, and we can't have that.
2. Unreasonably high conflict-avoidance, going out of their way to avoid breaking norms or instigating fights even to their detriment, general light-footed attitude towards any conversation, general apathy towards addressing real problems.
Am I wrong here? Anyway, I get what you're trying to say, but Ezra Klein is not the messenger for that, the context of his character makes a statement like that very different to saying the equivalent "Some people are almost certainly pedophiles or sex traffickers, they work in places like the UN, royal families, etc. and here are some of their names." Evidence for some of that was available even before the latest tranche. But he didn't say that or something like that, because he's a bit of a coward, he constantly avoids difficult subjects (see his sam harris debate), and he's a liberal through and through, he must defend power and tiptoe around truth.
America is an example of the failures of liberal democracy, coming from a leftist. They are have produced people like Ezra Klein who have in their small part collectively enabled decades of corruption and stagnation to go unchecked.
Its a very broad generalization, to say “liberals” have a certain characteristic. Chatgpt tells me in the US that would be about 80 million people. It's also a pretty diverse group, racially, religiously, genderwise, in education level (although decreasingly for this one). I don't find much value in trying to collectively describe such a large group.
On “Reluctance to question power”.
In recent memory… did Ezra not very publically call for Joe Biden to step down as Democratic candidate in a time when no democratic member of Congress had done so. Joe Biden being arguably the most powerful man in the world at that moment.
Hasn't Ezra consistently (for like a decade) called for amending the filibuster? Is that not a very specific and practical way of questioning power(whether you agree with it or not)?
In general, aren't all efforts to tax the billionaires and regulate huge monopolies coming from the liberal side of society. Whether or not we agree with those methods, are they not questioning power?
On “high conflict avoidance”
Liberals in general I think we can attribute to a large extent (not exclusively ) the “woke era”, cancellation culture, black lives matter protests, etc.
Those are all high conflict topics, no (whether we agree with them or not)?
On “general apathy towards addressing real problems”
Have you read Ezra's latest book Abundance?
It's an extremely pragmatic attempt to start a new movement towards a society that builds on a large scale to solve it's problems.
It's basically the opposite of apathy, it's an attempt at pragmatism.
Ezra pretty constantly discusses the lefts theory of winning/power. If I recall correctly advocating for Democrats embracing more Joe Manchin-like characters that might be distasteful (to progressives) in one sense, like pro-oil or pro-life, but who have a chance of winning swing states and joining a broader Democratic coalition.
On “ some members of [Royal families] are almost certainly pedophiles or sex traffickers”
I guess you're talking about Andrew?
I’m not 100% up to date on all the Epstein releases. But Im pretty sure Andrew was accused of sexually abusing a trafficked 17 year old. I'm not sure if theres allegations or evidence that he was aware of her age or that she was trafficked.
I'm not defending his horrible terrible actions, I'm just saying, I think hes being accused of being an abuser/mega creep/ lier/ abuser of public trust… but not specifically pedophilia or sex trafficking. I might be wrong on this.
But yes I agree with you, there's probably a base rate of pedophilia, like 1% (for example) , and the rich and powerful it's probably higher, because 1. they are powerful so can get away with shit and feel untouchable 2. I think non-empathic people rise to power and riches easier.
Again, not defending Andrew or Epstein and their horrible actions, but I dont find very general, vibes-based broad accusations to be helpful.
So I'm not shitting on you here, but this is a limitation with "chatgpt research". We already have established definitions for terms like "liberal" in political science, there are core tenets which they all must believe in order to be considered liberals and core psychological traits which lead them to those beliefs, and so in this context it is reasonable to make fuzzy generalisations about the entire group. Self-identified liberals, which may or may not be 80 million Americans I don't know, those are not entirely who I am talking about, there's probably 10s of millions of people in that group who either don't qualify, misrepresent their beliefs, are apolitical but vote democrat because their partner told them to, etc.
Was calling for biden to step down "questioning power"? He was simply making what he felt was the best calculation to allow liberals to win even more power. Same with the fillibuster.
My understanding is those social justice issues you speak of were fairly controversial, with some liberals or liberal-adjacents believing things like black lives matter were harming election chances and demanding their democratic leaders to change course. In any case, there is still a lot of conflict avoidance in other areas, like failing to help Ukraine defeat Russia, which has been a problem with 2 different democratic administrations now.
Abundance is a fine proposal I guess, but even the people who agree with it have largely criticised it for being just okay and not bold enough. Some of those people include fellow liberals. Ezra's "pragmatism" is an example of conflict-avoidance. He should have been advocating for Mamdanis, not Manchins.
"I'm not sure if theres allegations or evidence that he was aware of her age or that she was trafficked."
Look, this comes down to different standards of evidence. For some people, nothing will ever be enough. Revealing private statements, witness testimony, pictures of him with underaged girls, etc... it's not enough for you, and that's okay for you, but not for me.
Fog of War stuff...
IRAN:
1. Trump's new terms for peace with Iran largely match Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — which Iran seemed to be following (to the letter, but possibly not the spirit) until Trump scrapped them in 2017 as being inadequate. But Trumpers claim he'll do a better job of enforcing them (but instead of scrapping them, why didn't he do a better job of enforcing them when he was Prez the first time around?). I've seen lots of pushback on the claim that JCPOA was the same as Trump's demands, because it didn't address ballistic missiles and sponsoring terrorist groups, but there were already sanctions in place for those under Obama.
2. As for Iran's missiles, two were fired at the US-UK base in Diego Garcia. The US claims one was intercepted in flight and the other one failed in flight. It's not clear how close they came to Diego Garcia before they were intercepted/failed, but Diego Garcia is between 2300 and 2500 miles from the launch site in Iran. Iran may have also hit Dimona, Israel's non-nuclear, non-facility, which designs, tests (and fabricates?) Israel's non-nuclear nuclear arsenal. Significant damage wasn't reported, but I haven't seen before-and-after satellite comparisons yet. The Jerusalem Post said the strike hit the neighborhood next to Dimona, and not the complex itself. However, open-source OSINT observers say the strike hit a newly-built shelter within the complex. Either way, the rumor mill says Iran was trying to take out Israel's nuclear brain-trust with this strike.
3. Trump gave Iran an ultimatum on Saturday to open the Strait of Hormuz in 48 hours or else. Those 48 hours are just about up. Waiting to see if there's any stick to back up his demand...
4. Trump also claims that the Iranians are negotiating for peace and there will be a deal soon. The Iranians said that they haven't entered into any negotiations.
5. The talking heads and X commentariat suggest that the US and Israel have divergent opinions on what the exit strategy is, with Netanyahu dissatisfied with the US wanting to exit the conflict. The usual anonymous official sources say the US is upset that Israel has been targeting Iran's oil facilities. I think it was in a Haaretz opinion piece that I read that Jared Kushner was able to persuade Trump to go along with the Israeli strike on Iran because of its oil resources. All of this is whispers and should be taken with a grain of salt. But the fact that whispers are occurring suggests tension between Israeli and US aims and positions.
CHINA:
1. Speaking of whispers, the rumor coming out of China is that over 30 Chinese radar technicians and advisors are either dead or missing in Iran. All these techies came from the 14th, 22nd, and 38th Technical Institutes, and all these research institutions are involved in various aspects of radar systems. Back in China, the CCDI (Central Committee of Discipline and Inspection) has reportedly been interviewing hundreds of engineers, managers, and finance people from these organizations.
2. Four movers and shakers, all eminent engineers in China's military corporations, have also been removed from the China Academy of Engineering's list of members: radar expert Wu Manqing, Managing Director of the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), and missile guidance and control expert Wei Yiyin. All of them are senior management types, as well as political advisory roles. And a certain Mr. Zhao (I don't have his first name), an expert in condensed matter physics and part of China's nuclear brain trust, has been removed from the CAE. Wu and Wei, Mr. Radar and Mr. Missile, are particularly interesting because they were involved in the systems that failed miserably in Iran and Venezuela. The fourth person in this drama is Yang Wei. He was removed last year as the Deputy Manager of China's Aviation Industry Corporation, which makes Chinese military jets. He was once listed as an expert in stealth technology and was known as the father of China's J20 stealth fighter. He was also an alternate member of the CCP's Central Committee. There are now questions about whether China's anti-stealth radar developers and its J20 developers systemically falsified their data. These were all Xi's hallmark achievements where China matched or exceeded the West's technical capabilities.
3. On top of all this defense industry turmoil, a hacker group calling itself Flaming China claimed it broke into China's National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin, allegedly resulting in the theft of over 10 petabytes of sensitive research data.
4. Coincidentally, China has changed its tone about Taiwan. Last Wednesday, Chen Binhua, a spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s State Council, said, “Peaceful reunification would create significant opportunities for Taiwan's economic and social development and bring tangible benefits to Taiwan compatriots.” Peaceful was stressed at several points in his statement.
RUSSIA/UKRAINE:
1. Putin hasn't made any media appearances recently. He's gone silent several times in the past for as long as 10 days to 2 weeks. But armed para-military and/or FSB officers have been patrolling the streets of Moscow.
2. The reported Internet shutdown in Russia may ony be affecting Moscow and St. Petersburg.
3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
4. The Russian Spring offensive in Ukraine seems to have fizzled out before it started. Ukraine has made advances in a couple of places along the lines, and RU is moving troops and material into those places to fill the gaps. We're only talking about tens of square kilometers (or possibly a low hundred Km2). But the lack of Starlink seems to have degraded Russian response capabilities.
5. Ukraine's Ambassador to the UK, General Zaluzhnyi, has warned that Iran has obtained Russian drone technology. Although they haven't really caught up to Ukraine's tech, he says that if the US sent marines into Iran, they'd likely suffer from the 25-50 km kill zone of current drone warfare.
6. Has the US accepted Ukraine's offer of drone assistance? I see conflicting reports. Zelenskyy says he's sent over 200 advisors to the five Gulf countries. He says Ukraine has enough surplus production to supply 1,000 drones per day to allies.
>3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
While there has been a fair amount of chatter in Finland about the Russian state media going through one of its periodic bouts of chest-thumping about invading Estonia (they tend to variably target these at 1-3 Baltic countries with Estonia as a popular choice), there's nothing about them threatening Finland in local news, which tend to be quite attuned to talk of that sort. Where are you getting threats of invading Finland?
This is not really anything particularly special, the Russian state media tends to bluster about all of the neighboring countries. Have an actual troop buildout and we're talking.
IIRC, it was one of the guests on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov show the week before last. Not Margarita Simonyan (the poor girl is looking a bit less feisty since her chemo), but one of those other dudes who like to pound their fists. I can't imagine that Russia has the spare troops and armored equipment to do much. And I hear the fence that the Finns are putting up on the Russian Border is pretty high-tech.
Also, Moscow claims it's staffing up the 44th Army Corps at Petrozavodsk, about 160 km from the Finnish border. They're aiming for 15,000 troops to be stationed there, but someone said it's still barely staffed, with RU sending all its able-bodied (and a bunch of disabled-bodied) men into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
And this week, Solovyov suggested again that Russia attack two of his favorite bêtes noires, Latvia and Poland.s
Re: Iran. I try to ignore this stuff, but this is hard. I was thinking, shit what are the chances Israel drops a nuke on Iran. And I went looking on poly market... the question had been taken down, but before that the betting was at 22% yes, by the end of the year. WTF, Israel should know that the will become 'evil' among many Americans if they drop a nuke.
Israel knowing a thing, and everyone on Polymarket knowing that Israel knows a thing, are two very different things.
Yeah, and I don't know a thing. And nukes remain scary.
While I wouldn't put it past Netanyahu to want to nuke Iran, I would hope his general staff would talk him out of it. But Iran is a perfect example of why a country would want to have nukes. Everyone now knows that American guarantees can be withdrawn by a change in administration.
If they weren't already inclined to do so by Iranian aggressiveness, I'm sure the Saudi's have a team looking at the feasibility of going nuclear. Ukraine is rumored to have a team designing a prototype nuclear weapon. Taiwan probably has a team studying it. Brazil and South Africa discontinued their nuclear weapons programs, but they could probably reactivate them with minimal difficulty.
Ironically, the world might be a safer place if everyone had nukes.
IDK if everyone is safer, But I understand that everyone wants one now. I'd want one, but I already live in the USA.
I wouldn't presume to claim that I understand the medieval mindset of mullahs (correction: modern minds with a medieval religious mindset), but if they had them, don't you think they'd have used them by now? Their regime is under an existential threat, and they see themselves as the True Iranians and True Muslims, and they don't see themselves bound by 20th-century humanistic niceties. If they believe that the God of the Prophet was on their side, and given their Twelver eschatological beliefs, why wouldn't they have used their nukes by now?
Or maybe in their heart of hearts, they're not as committed to their ideology as they claim, and they're worried about their corporeal survival and the survival of their families?
I don't know.
But I can certainly envision Netanyahu, with his zero-sum 20th-century worldview, in a situation where he's running low on Iron Dome missiles and Iranian missiles are taking out critical Israeli infrastructure, giving the order to drop a special package on Qom.
I-4: This one is interesting to me, because as far as I understand, the most recent contacts never got as far as a plan, or deep, meaningful discussions, or anything like what Trump declared. It's no more than Ghalibaf freelancing diplomacy through Arab third parties. The fact that the United States has latched on to him as a potential interlocutor (and maybe future de facto leader of Iran) is a little ironic, given how establishment he is, and how hawkish he has been toward the very protesters who were at one point Mossad's and consequently the US administration's great hope for regime change. Still, if sanctions are lifted and compensation granted in a face-saving way (Strait tolls, etc.), a settlement is not impossible.
RU-1: Putin decorated the paralympians in a semi-public ceremony... about five days ago, wasn't it? I'm no Bayesian, but if I were, my priors on Putin manqué would be highly shifted in the direction of skepticism by now.
RU-2: Related to the above, +1 to those who say that the shutdowns are essentially anti-drone/anti-cyber. They've been regularly happening in the border oblasts for that reason. That they've now happened in Moscow and Piter is noteworthy and positive from Ukraine's perspective (drone ramp-up working), but I struggle to see the mechanistic explanation for how this relates to coup prevention or leads to walled-off internet or whatever.
RU-3: Finland? Is it Medvedev? I bet it's Medvedev.
Yes, I just saw the news about Putin decorating the paralympians. This is one reason I use the subject heading "fog of war": there are so many claims and counterclaims to wade through.
> 3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
Finland is probably a very dumb idea, but the Baltics are possible. That extra strength might be nothing when used against a country that is spending one third of its GDP on the military and has spent the last four years learning how to counter your every trick.
But let's say you attack three much smaller countries that have only a theoretical grasp of drone warfare. What's more, you do it in a maximally divisive way that doesn't trigger a unified NATO response. You use local pro-Russian paramilitaries to stage some protests and violently resist local police in Narva. Then have them attack Estonian police and military installations there. Then they either flee to Russia and continue attacking Estonia from across the border, Hezbollah style, or, if Estonia overplays its hand and cracks down hard on Narva, you send a limited detachment into Estonia for "peacekeeping purposes".
Estonia invokes Article 5 but isn't able to muster unanimous support. The US is busy, the UK is willing to send a warship into the Baltic Sea, Poland and Finland and the Baltics are all ready to help and send troops, but not ready to attack Russian territory.
In response to the "unprovoked escalation against peacekeeping forces" you then dump a whole load of sea mines and USVs into the Baltic and close the Suwalki Gap. If Poland or Finland try to enter Russian territory, their troops get eliminated by drones. Trump posts "the EU and Russia must MAKE PEACE NOW" on Truth Social.
Wouldn’t Russia also suffer a lot from closing the Baltic?
And Kaliningrad seems like a low-hanging fruit.
NATO maintains a forward presence in the Baltics precisely so that this "maximally divisive, doesn't trigger a unified NATO response" thing basically can't happen. When you get to the stage where Russian troops go into e.g. Estonia, they're in a shooting war with, let me check my notes, Belgium, Iceland, Denmark, France, and the United States, They basically can't not be, because "before you shoot anyone, make very sure exactly which style of green camo they're wearing, and only shoot at the ones wearing the Estonian uniforms, not the Belgian or Danish or French ones", is not one you can give to an invasion force with any expectation of it being obeyed. Neither is "at every encounter, do not fire unless fired upon, even if you've been fired upon in the last ten encounters and so fifty of your comrades are now Cargo 200". Russian troops moving into Estonia absolutely will run into e.g. French soldiers, say "aha, more of those damn Estonians like the ones who shot Ivan and Alexy this morning", and shoot them.
That's the sort of thing that ensures a unified NATO response. Which, again, is the point. NATO might, in the heat of the moment, prefer not to live in a world where NATO soldiers are coming home in coffins thanks to Russian bullets and vice versa, but they've precommitted to closing off that option. The only question is, given that they're going to be A: dying and B: killing Russians, how much of that are they going to do?
The answer will almost certainly be "...enough to make sure the Russians regret starting this damn fool war", and so the amount of men and guns and tanks NATO sends to reinforce the Baltics will be calculated to be enough to make the Russians regret starting such a war. This is the low-risk option for NATO in terms of both domestic and international politics; if things go badly they can at least say "we gave it our best shot" and evacuate by sea (the Russian Baltic Fleet is a joke) or into Poland (the Polish Army is not a joke). And with most of the Russian army bogged down in Ukraine, NATO can easily spare the troops to make them regret any Baltic sideshow.
Maybe NATO will let Russia "win", but it would be a pyrrhic victory. And I'm pretty sure Putin understands this,
> You use local pro-Russian paramilitaries to stage some protests and violently resist local police in Narva. […]
I think the plausible deniability required for this would be almost impossible to pull off today. European governments and citizens have become much more sensitive to Russia's sneaky tricks after 2014, and even more so after 2022.
Was there a genuine expectation that Chinese tech in either Iran or Venenzuela would prevent US from achieving air superiority? Seems very optimistic, even if the tech was quite good. Surely it couldnt be deployed and manned at the scale necessary to hold off for long. It could still come up short on operational expectations (like the radar system never saw the plane that took it out). But that would be less visible to outside observation.
Well, the Iranians and Venezuelans who approved the purchase of the Chinese tech must have been under the impression that it was superior to the Russian offerings and as good as the US systems. In fact, people who've looked at the Chinese systems say many of them were copied whole cloth from stolen US technology. And I've heard from a South African (former) diplomat acquaintance that the Chinese use that as a selling point.
One analyst suggested that the reason the copied tech didn't work as well as the US original is that the Chinese were cutting corners on testing (and diverting some of the testing budget into their own pockets). Also, the US is continually updating its software and upgrading its electronics, so the Chinese may not have been using the latest/greatest as their model.
I'd be worried that AFAIK, there's no verified record of the U.S. military conducting direct, controlled tests of its anti-stealth radar systems against the Chinese J20 stealth fighters. The Chinese media has claimed that the J20 have flown undetected near US-supplied Taiwanese radar without being detected. These claims lack independent confirmation, though. Just because we could bypass the Chinese tech in Iran with our stealth planes, doesn't mean that China couldn't bypass ours with their stealth planes.
spy balloons are not stealthed at least AFAIK
Looks like the Chinese anti-stealth radar does work. I just read that they were able to shoot down two F-35s.
I wouldn't expect it to stop the US from achieving air superiority, but you would think they'd have liked to shoot down at least a few planes along the way, both for a propaganda victory and ideally some surviving pilots to use as hostages. (They did supposedly hit an F35 but the plane landed successfully in another country.) The USAF and IAF have apparently been operating with complete impunity over Iran, not even needing to be careful.
It's especially interesting in the context of the Ukraine war, where air defences have been strong enough to prevent either side operating over the other's territory.
> It's especially interesting in the context of the Ukraine war, where air defences have been strong enough to prevent either side operating over the other's territory.
That's because both countries have inherited the Soviet doctrine that emphasized A2/AD over achieving air superiority.
Well, most countries have terribly underfunded air defence to begin with, as we are now learning. Also, the dismantling of Iranian air defence began a year ago in the 12 day war, when Israel eliminated many of their generals. They have likely been too uncoordinated and exposed to set up proper defences.
It's a difficult problem to solve, you need very good tech, and defending is 10:1 more expensive than attacking.
> 3. RU state media figures are talking about the necessity of invading Estonia and/or Finland. I find this hard to believe since their military is bogged down in Ukraine. If they have the extra strength to invade Finland and/or Estonia, why aren't they using them in Ukraine?
Maybe they're hoping that China/North Korea will pick up the slack ? In addition, while Russia doesn't have the troops for a full-scale ground invasion, they have effectively infinite amounts of drones/missiles/artillery with which to bombard the Baltics and maybe Finland as well. Regardless of the degree of success, at the very least pressure on these other countries will distract the West from Ukraine, thus reducing military aid and possibly allowing Russia to finally force Ukraine to surrender.
Distract them by.....encouraging them to blow up Russian infrastructure and people with extreme prejudice? That doesn't seem to work to the benefit of Russia's Ukraine ambitions.
I don't think that Estonia or Finland have the means to do that by themselves. The US will most likely decline to get involved at all, and Europe will try to exhaust every other possible option before committing any troops or fielding their own artillery/air support assets.
But muh NATO fifth paragraph
What other options do they have? Take it lying down? And I don't think that Estonia and Finland would necessarily be fighting qua Estonia and Finland given that they're a NATO countries and opposing Russian aggression is the whole point of the alliance. Trump has done horrific damage to said alliance, but that's not a reason for disunity in Europe.
> What other options do they have? Take it lying down?
I think that, should Putin invade (or simply engage in sustained bombardment), they would look at the situation in Ukraine and weigh their options. Certainly Ukraine demonstrated that resistance is possible -- but at what price, and for how long ? Faced with the choice between keeping their independence in the short to medium term at the cost of many lives and virtually their entire infrastructure; and surrendering their autonomy in the long term but keeping their people alive and power stations intact; Estonia and Finland may very well rationally choose the latter.
> And I don't think that Estonia and Finland would necessarily be fighting qua Estonia and Finland given that they're a NATO countries
I think that NATO is effectively dead. Yes, it will continue to exist on paper, but faced with a realistic Russian threat short of a nuclear strike and/or an open and explicit declaration of war on all of the West, they will express grave concern and promise support and maybe send a few actual advisors... but not much else. The US is effectively out of the alliance, and the European countries have neither the resources nor the political will to resist Russia+China+North Korea.
Is there any reason to believe that China and NK would support a hypothetical Russian invasion into the Baltics?
Because I always figured that in any kind of prolonged conflict Russia wouldn't be able to take Europe. Just on account of the differences in economic power.
I believe in 2022 you could've argued about Russia's large stockpiles and the element of surprise, both of these are now gone. Unlike Russia, Europe has not moved to a war economy, but defense spending increased a lot and other measures have been taken to increase readiness. In my country mandatory military service has been reintroduced and reportedly military personel numbers are on the rise again even before factoring that in.
So I think the only way Russia takes the Baltics or Finland is if the remainder of the alliance says "Fuck it, not my problem".
Russia probably hoped that would be our reaction to Ukraine and they've been wrong about that. I'm thinking if an actual NATO ally was attacked they'd at least be twice as wrong.
The scenario you're describing in your first paragraph is utterly ridiculous in 2026. In 2021 it would have been a different story, but five years later, most of Russia's heavy equipment has been destroyed, the remainder is mostly garbage, their air force is mostly neutralized, and most of their army consists of barely trained recruits and cripples serving as drone magnets. For fucks sake, they're riding on donkeys and mopeds to the front line.
Oh, and almost all of their personnel is bound in Ukraine. For a mass attack they'd have to draw away 100,000s of soldiers away from Ukraine. I think we'd notice this rather quickly.
As a European and someone who's following the Ukraine war, this post shows a profound misunderstanding of how Europeans and Ukranians weigh a possible Russian occupation, and of the military power of the respective parties
> the rumor coming out of China is that over 30 Chinese radar technicians and advisors are either dead or missing in Iran
I might be confused. What does this suggest, if anything?
Implicitly, that Chinese radar installations deployed in Iran were not adequate to defend against the stealth capabilities of the F-35.
If I were given the task of standing next to a Chinese radar installation in an active warzone I'd go missing too.
I like my chances of fleeing a lot better than I like my chances standing next to a high-powered "please target me next" beacon.
And so Iran... *killed* them? Dang.
Um, no. They're extremely high profile targets for being blown up as part of SEAD operations. I'm basically assuming they were in the vicinity when the radars were destroyed.
Thanks for explaining it. Maybe I wasn't obvious enough.
I really like these fog of war updates.
> The Russian Spring offensive in Ukraine seems to have fizzled out before it started.
It's rasputica season. Until the ground dries up it's impossible to conduct any large-scale operations. Both sides are literally stuck in the mud right now.
Doesn't look like the mud is a factor in discouraging them.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-21-2026/
Nor is the mud discouraging Ukraine...
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraine-is-suddenly-on-the-offensive-with-help-from-elon-musk-ea6ee661
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/11/ukraine-records-first-territorial-gains-since-2023-amid-russian-army-woes
Mud is still a major factor. While dismounted infantry is less slowed down by mud than vehicles, they still have to be supplied. They need ammunition for their guns and mortars, they need new drones, they need food and water. Artillery further back needs lots of safe firing positions to avoid counter-battery fire.
You should try crawling through knee-deep cold wet mud to see how much it can discourage action.
It may be that mud is slowing things down, but neither side seems to be letting it get in the way of the battle plans.
Yeah. I thought the spring mud narrative was back when maneuver warfare was the assumption, tanks armor etc. if its infantry creeping around to capture drone operator nodes, mud doesnt seem like it would be the same disabler.
Thanks for the updates by the way. I hadnt seen any of that China discussion
Major clarification: MOBILE Internet shutdowns are affecting Moscow and St. Petersburg, and only during drone attacks. It's also nothing new: regions closer to the border has been experiencing same mobile net shutdowns for months already.
Wired internet works as usual (aside from Telegram, which has been blocked, but is still accessible through proxies and VPNs; there are some reports that DPI hardware is overwhelmed by the block and Telegram's response DDoS attack on RosKomNadzor's servers, and that caused WhatsApp to be unblocked randomly; I can second-hand confirm that WhatsApp is sometimes accessible without VPNs, but the reason is unclear).
> armed para-military and/or FSB officers have been patrolling the streets of Moscow.
No signs of those as of today in city center.
> Putin hasn't made any media appearances recently.
I don't know about media appearances, but Armenians confirmed telephone call with him yesterday.
All in all, the part about Russia (and possible Ukraine) seems to be mostly composed of propaganda-derived information. I understand that it's hard to get any other, especially if you don't know the language, but one should try harder.
And I guess they're not turning off the mobile phone networks near their oil facilties.
And Ukraine just hit the Primorsk oil terminal on the Baltic again. This is RU's largest oil export facility that's still operational on the western side of the country. Videos of the tank farm burning have been posted on X, and Ukraine says they also damaged the oil loading infrastructure.
And Ukraine also hit the Ufa oil refinery in the Republic of Bashkortostan. That's all the way over in the foothills of the Urals. About 1100 miles or 1800 km as the crow flies from Ukraine, but probably further because Ukrainian Flamingos etc. follow the winding river valleys and stay close to the ground to avoid radar detection.
Shutting down mobile network is not a guarantee that drone won't hit anything, it's just another counter-measure, and may or may not work. Drones on both sides are known to use mobile network, although the exact use was never made clear. Since only the mobile internet is shut down, while cell connection stays up, my guess is that drones don't use cell towers for triangulation (probably due to low precision) even in cases where GPS is jammed. It's not impossible, though, that they send back some kind of telemetry, or even camera feed, and may accept control signals in turn. The delay would make any last-second course corrections impossible, but a human operator still can make some decisions, like highlighting targets before the final approach. The discovery of SIM cards in drone debris prove that internet is used for something, anyway.
I think the hypothesis that the government wants to control the flow of negative information is more likely. It's also the simpler explanation, since Ukraine has admitted its long-range drones rely on GNSS and INS.
How would shutting down cell phone towers do anything to prevent Ukrainian drone strikes? Long-range Ukrainian drones' primary means of navigation are based on GNSS and INS. GNSS (e.g., GPS/GLONASS/Galileo) for global positioning and inertial navigation systems (INS) to continue navigating when signals are jammed. They're specifically designed to be independent from ground infrastructure, like cell towers, which can be taken offline. That's why RU has concentrated all its GNSS-jamming equipment around Moscow and St. Petersburg (and short-changing the frontlines).
And why are they suddenly doing it now? Why weren't they doing it when Ukraine started hitting Moscow in 2024? And it seems like this a broader crackdown than just cell phone networks.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/europe/internet-outages-russia-digital-crackdown-intl-cmd
Why now? Because of growing number of drones, and because infrastructure and laws to make shutdowns possible took time. Moscow was hit by a couple of drones at the beginning of war, then largely left alone, but currently Ukraine is ramping up efforts to reach the city, it seems, so shutdowns now kind of make sense. As for St. Petersburg, it's speculated that Baltic countries are letting Ukraine use their airspace for a more covert approach from the sea these days.
Is this a part of some kind of a bigger crackdown? I'm not seeing it. The article you linked also mostly talks about mobile internet only (the rest - blocking of some social networks, sites and messengers mostly isn't a new development, aside from the recent block on Telegram which I mentioned). The country IS probably moving toward Chinese model of internet restrictions, but this particular round of shutdowns imo entirely due to increased production of Ukrainian long-range drones.
That's true of the usual sort of long-range drone strike, against fixed targets known from satellite imagery or the like. But in some cases, e.g. Operation Spiderweb ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb ), the Ukrainians have used Russian mobile networks for real-time control and detailed targeting of drones. So it's certainly plausible that the Russians might shut down mobile networks when they fear imminent drone attack.
My understanding is that cell phone networks were useful for targeting cell phone *users* for short-range drones along the front lines. And, yes, Operation Spiderweb used Russian SIM cards for the C-and-C communications. But my understanding was this for the local operators who had snuck into the country.
I don't know when it happened, but Russia implemented bans on international incoming calls from "unfriendly countries" (i.e., Ukraine), and WhatsApp, Viber, FaceTime have been blocked or restricted for ages. Not sure how a RU SIM could communicate C-and-C info back to Ukraine.
They've completely shut down access to the Internet now.
> Russia has achieved most of its strategic aims in the Ukraine […] stopping Zelensky from bombing Ukrainians
"The Ukrainians can't kill Ukrainians if we kill them first" *tapping-finger-on-head meme*
Though I did find Gawdflea's theses a little painful to read, this one is actually coherent if you consider Donbas (well, I suppose Donbass, nowadays) separatists to be Ukrainians.
Coherent, but not quite true. Ukraine is capable of attacking Belgorod and Kursk with drones fairly regularly, let alone Donetsk and Luhansk.
"There are cities in the breakaway republics that were being bombed on a daily basis for years, until Russia invaded."
This is false as stated (daily basis for years) even if one is charitable and substitutes shelling for bombing.
"Let's just say, when you're dropping real bombs, and not 'ittie bittie drones', that buildings are kinda wrecked."
Oh, for heaven's sake. Are you suggesting that the current war *prevented* the physical destruction of Donbass cities and towns? Donetsk is a ghost of its former self. The capital just about abides, but everywhere else much of the population has fled. Soledar, Artyomovsk, Marinka, Chasiv Yar, Krasnoarmeysk, Ugledar, and Avdiivka, all of which had readily endured the prior eight years of fighting between the government and separatists, are now destroyed or abandoned.
"We'll just repeat that Azov threatened to assassinate Zelensky if he stopped bombing the Eastern Ukraine (erm? would you rather I call it something else?)"
They repeatedly rejected his authority to order withdrawals and agree to cease-fires, yes. I revile Azov and their ilk as much as the next man, and I have a very low opinion of the way in which the Ukrainian national identity has been shaped post-2014. None of that backs up your claims of wholesale bombing prior to the full-scale war, or of security for the people of the annexed oblasts having now been achieved.
The Canary Institute has a working paper up, with a new framework for understanding the potential economic impact of AI. Headline result: half the time in the economy is **already** reachable by AI, and it will be going up soon:
https://canaryinstitute.ai/blog/measuring-ais-economic-reach/
That's the blog post, but links to the full paper for those inderested.
Trump is threatening to attack another NATO country, Denmark, to take Greenland. The other NATO countries can no longer trust that the US is on their side. Therefore some of them will likely get nukes to defend themselves against Russia. Or against the US even.
The more countries have nukes the more likely that there will be a nuclear war that wipes out humanity. The more countries have nukes the more likely that a crazy country leader or general or similar starts a nuclear war. Or that a nuclear war is triggered by a nuke launched by mistake.
By threatening to attack NATO, I think Trump has doubled the chances of humanity going extinct by nuclear war in the next 50 years. If Trump does attack NATO he’ll likely double the chances again.
The Republican Party is a bigger existential threat than AI.
The French already have nukes that are poised to attack the United States. Though their main targets are Poland and Germany. (Seriously.)
Also: If you apply this reasoning consistently then the Chinese build up is already a non-theoretical thing that's happening. And was before Trump. Turning nuclear binary game theory into trinary is WAY more of a threat. Why is that not your bigger concern?
Given that my information is correct unless the French military is lying I'm going to give it a roughly 99% chance of being correct. French nuclear strategy is public.
French military doctrine explicitly includes rapid fire capabilities to hit the United States and has since the Cold War. It also has a doctrine of nuking allies territory if they are losing a war and feel nukes will slow down the advancing army (mostly in Germany and now Poland). It also has the "warning shot" doctrine (ultime avertissement) where French doctrine allows the use of a single nuclear weapon lower on the escalation ladder than anyone else.
That said, I agree the chances of France doing it to the US are low. On the other hand, China has been going through a massive re-armament such that we are approaching a world with three major nuclear powers. And I do think that is destabilizing.
I agree in general that it is absolutely terrible for any number of reasons that Trump threatened to invade Greenland (perfidy, aggression, damage to NATO, short-term risk of war, etc), but I am not sure this particular line of argument follows.
In particular, at least two other NATO countries (Britain and France) already have their own moderately substantial nuclear arsenals. I suppose other NATO countries might want their own independent deterrents, but off the top of my head the main candidates from a technical and fiscal perspective are either closely aligned with one of the existing nuclear powered (e.g. Canada with Britain) or have internal political reasons pushing them against building nukes (e.g. Germany).
Do note however that Britain's nuclear deterrent is based entirely on missiles that they rent from the United States. Britain has the technical means to build a wholly independent nuclear arsenal, but for economic reasons their submarines sail to King's Bay, Georgia to fill up with US-made Trident missiles before returning to Faslane to have British thermonuclear warheads installed.
Were I the British PM, I would suspect these missiles might mysteriously malfunction if launched towards the United States, and would not have high confidence that they would deter the United States of anything.
France's nuclear deterrent, at least, is wholly French.
Interesting. The concept of renting a single-use weapon system seems curious to me, although I suppose if Britain did have to use them, they'd have bigger concerns than forfeiting their deposit and the US would likewise have bigger concerns than collecting on any overage.
Yes, I would have similar concerns were I the British PM. I've read enough Harry Turtledove novels to imagine improvised ways of delivering a warhead somewhere inconvenient without a missile, but such measures would be orders of magnitude less practical and effective as a deterrent.
Statistically, fire insurance is almost certainly single-use (or zero-use!) and we still pay for that. (I don’t promise that the analogy is sound, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head.)
The "renting" is paying for support. The missiles need maintenance (though I don't know how or why). This is done in the US.
The missiles are also drawn from the same pool as the ones on US submarines. A British SSBN shows up in King's Bay, deposits its old worn-out missiles, gets the next sixteen freshly-refurbished missiles in the pipeline, and heads back to Scotland. There are no missiles that are marked "property of the United Kingdom", there are just missiles that the crown has paid to have sit in the tubes of His Majesty's Submarine for the time being, and will probably spend most of their service life in American submarines,
I don’t know enough about how these missiles work, but it occurs to me we probably wouldn’t want even our *own* missiles to be launched at American targets. Is it plausible that *all* the missiles we manufacture have that targeting restriction built in?
I mean, it seems more likely that the targeting system lives outside the missile? But it would be amusing. On the other hand, it seems you are rebutting yourself here, so perhaps I should stay out of it. ;-)
Where did you see Trump is threatening to attack Denmark?
Agreed. "Has threatened", yes, but last I heard he'd backed down in exchange for minor concessions about basing rights that allowed him to save a bit of face. As I understand it, the concessions are either affirmations of long-standing treaties or at most stuff that the US could probably have obtained at any point by asking nicely.
I have not heard anything about "is threatening" in the present tense.
What was the chance of Denmark realistically ever saying "no" before Trumps Greenland-threats? Denmark specifically was and is one of NATOs most involved members, certainly when measured on a per-capita basis.
This isn't comparable to the Ukraine-Russia relations in any meaningful way, other than in the "the opposite of"-kind of comparison.
Hm, but why? The US and Denmark were strong allies, and Denmark letting the US have a more-or-less permanent base on Greenland is surely considered an asset for Denmark, no? It provides extra security against traditional aggressors, it provides ample opportunity for joint training and personnel exchange. Why would Denmark in a before-Trump situation ever throw them out? They gain more than it costs them.
Maybe there is some misunderstanding here between us?
Anyone here feels like they struggled in dating and then managed to unlock something that made it significantly easier? What was the thing?
I guess I'm looking for more big bang for your buck interventions ever since getting a cat (she's a huge positive impact in my quality of life).
My experience, which is from the around 1980, is probably so dinosaurian as to be useless today. But honestly, the thing that really tipped things for me was when I gave up and stopped looking. That was when I suddenly became interesting to a whole handful of women, including the one who is now my dear wife. My only explanation is that I had been exuding a desperation that was off-putting.
I’m one of those people who dislikes dating, you can hate dating and still find a partner, just like you can hate going to open houses, but still buy a home you like. I think it’s a tractable problem if you put enough time, energy and resources into it.
I feel like pretty much every task I'm taking on, except dating, is fundamentally linear: there is a thing I can go do at will, and if I keep doing the thing I get better at it. Though all the things I do, I enjoy doing for their own sake.
I don't have that with dating, a concrete action I can take regularly that I enjoy. Only thing that comes to mind is grinding it out on the apps, which is seriously tedious and soul sucking. I feel like 95% of the profiles seem boring.
Learn how to cook (well!), if you don’t know it already.
Simpler clothesupgrade for online dating:
- tight, shaped, form fitting, a little uncomfy designer button down shirt, black or dark blue, sleeves rolled up and a big medallion hanging from the neck (gives the aesthetics a a center)
- tight, somewhat uncomfy dress jeans, does not have to be designer
- black shoes
- sunglasses on first pic (for style), without on the second (for trust)
- absolutely no prescription glasses, make them look like sunglasses (mine are like aviators, because Top Gun look always beats scientist look)
- 8 shitty selfies then prompting image generator AI with it, no catfishing ,recognizable, just best angle, lighting etc. background is nature
Online Dating 101: focus on clothes, elegant but unconventional: waistcoat, rolled up sleeves, bolo tie in the shape of a gemstone, that sort of stuff. Classy yet not boring, suggests success, quality, class, yet independence from social norms. They don't need to be expensive. Just make them all black for the sake of simplicity, but dark blue shirts also work. Sort of suggests "poor aristocrat". That is romantic. Dress jeans. Leather shoes.
Then take 8 shitty selfies and ask gemini to generate a realistic, yet romantic and professional, recognizable set of pics from them, background should be nature, like park. Do not catfish, should still be recognizably you, just well presented.
Buy or rent them, quit wasting time on people who think you owe them something or are a charity.
The most important thing is to be physically attractive which is being in shape, fixing aesthetic issues (teeth, hair, skin, etc), and dressing well. The next most important thing is being in a social environment where you meet potential partners frequently. Try to gain some status in the group ideally. If you're a woman that's basically it.
If you're a man there's additional things. Firstly money and social class (which is mostly university degrees as well as certain jobs). Secondly you need to get used to approaching women and asking them out. Thirdly learn enough photography and such to have a decent dating profile.
Physical attraction of men in the way you think about it is wildly overrated in dating. I'll make an exception for dressing reasonably well, doesn't have to be over the top though (just don't be a bum, don't have smelly clothes, dress accordingly).
Status games are wildly unattractive to many people, including potential partners. If one doesn't like status games, they shouldn't start playing them in order to find a mate. It is not a sustainable behavior if you don't like it, so you are essentially tricking your partner (and potentially yourself into a bad internal life).
Photography for a dating profile is .. weird. I would not be attracted to anyone with curated photographs if it is not something that is part of their regular life (for example, being a model/some other profession with lots of photographs, or a photographer themselves). But other people might be attacted to such measures. Question again is, is it yourself or are you bending to conform to a perceived succesful dating style/profile?
"Be yourself" sounds cliche and non-descript, but it still rings true to me. If you don't have an interesting life according to your own feelings, you won't have an interesting dating life either. One of my main hobbies is practically devoid of the opposite sex, and it still makes me attractive to my mate (who has nothing to do with that hobby) due to some skills and personality characteristics I have attained through it.
That's how I think too. I think my life is very interesting by my own standard, but I can't think of any way to display it in social media or a dating app profile.
Then stop giving a fuck about apps and socials .. I know it might sound ignorant for you. But you might think about giving it a try for a year or so? Just delete all that shit and go bird watching instead.
My perspective is that dating is 99% about finding the right partner, and 1% about not screwing things up. If dating is difficult then you're simply not dating the right person.
I spent so long, when I was single, trying to somehow make myself so irresistibly attractive that even women with whom I was completely incompatible would still want to go out with me for some reason.
Thanks, I think I needed to hear this.
Honestly, the best option is to start making large sums of money. You can then spend that money on improving your looks (e.g. hiring personal trainers) and signaling wealth (e.g. buying expensive watches).
Looks can be improved from $1000 just buying elegant but unconventional clothes, waistcoat, rolled up sleeves shirts, bolo ties. Women dig aesthetics and style more than they dig bodies.
As a woman, I'd advise against bolo ties.
They're extremely divisive.
But maybe the good kind of divisive. Having said that, opening the top three buttons and having a visible medal in the neck also works. I am not sure I understand the logic, but some decoration in that body region truly holds the picture together.
Bolos and medallions / necklaces could be a cultural thing. There are plenty of American women who would either be attracted to or neutral about them, but I suspect there are many, many more who'd feel the ick.
In my experience, this is something that people with attractive bodies say all the time. Sadly, I am not one of those, and I'm here to tell you this statement isn't necessarily true.
Clothes cover bodies, so anything beyond extreme obesity works there. A waistcoat can hide a smallish belly and a suit jacket can make narrow shoulders wider. Which is exactly why they were invented.
In case of of extreme obesity, the only good solution is the full three-piece suit, no matter how outdated that looks. Like this pic, kinda looks like royalty: https://jp.pinterest.com/pin/977984875314480017/
Also, some people simply like fat.
(if you want to end up with a woman who cares about looks and wealth...)
I feel that if one is posting ACX comments asking about dating advice, one cannot afford to be too choosy. And I say this as someone who's been single for a long time...
Contra: anyone posting on ACX is probably especially poorly suited for a woman who desires looks and money!
Or, arguably, any woman at all :-/ Er, or so I've heard. Yeah.
Yes absolutely. I went from 0 online dates to 4 with women I found very attractive in 2 weeks, could have gone a lot more but Married one of them: here is what I did. Lowest hanging fruit first.
1. Go online and read more advice for men from reputable reddits.
2. Get a decent short haircut and well groomed facial hair with a bit of beard if possible (really helps achieve a masculine jawline) do Google image comparisons if you don't believe me. Also read up how to dress in general. I bought new shoes, pants, and shirts
3. Buy a tripod to take candid seeming pictures of yourself in good lighting (I bought big bright lamps), good clothing, and pay for photofeeler (website) to get the top 4-5 (NOT MORE!) pictures of yourself in this way (or older photos). Photos should have you smiling.
4. Pay for Tinder and Bumble (etc) premium for a few months so you don't have to swipe ( it just gives you people who swiped on you) Restart your profile to remarket to people who may have dismissed you previously. Have a short, honest, non cringe description.
5. Learn how to converse on text chat and to get to date.
5. (Sorry about numbering) Memorize conversation starters (like 10+ very different) so you can recovery any awkward silences during the date.
6 Commit to no kiss on first date and ALWAYS go for kiss on second. I based this on studies about womens expectations. Takes pressure off me to "decide" mid date. Needless to say, work out well beforehand how you're going to pull it off near end of date.
7. (I didn't do this) Use the mathematically optimal way to decide number of people to date before settling down. See numberphile YouTube video on toilet selection (yes really)
8 (I didn't do this) people rarely think about this: New York has 10x more women than a smaller area. If you can move to a denser area, it could easily be Worth it. Getting married can decide your future as much as a job.
See more online advice on all these points and more. Good luck.
Feel free to DM me for more details. Always happy to help someone struggling with dating. It can suck with the wrong strategy
3/ you can use AI to combine a number of shitty selfies into pro quality photos
7-8/ please do not assume everybody is into boring Boomer lives with settling down and marriage, of all things
Alternatively, buy a dog!
Seriously, walking a dog is a great way to meet fellow dog walkers, especially as it is a regular routine with similar or identical routes so one can build up an acquaintance over a few increasingly personal encounters.
Of course, this assumes one is living in a town, where dog walkers are concentrated in parks and similar, and it might not work so well in rural areas.
Quiz mights are another way to get to know people, who might include suitable matches.
Re #3: just hire a professional. They will do a better job with photos than you will at home with a tripod. They are literal pros at making people look good on camera, and they deal with awkward/shy people all the time! A good photographer is surprisingly cheap for what you get.
I tried that first actually but got bad results. Advantage with doing it yourself is you can take a lot of photos in different outfits, etc. way cheaper.
But it must be a reasonable dog, i.e. neither a slavering pit bull nor at the other extreme a pink-dyed camp poodle (although the latter might be suitable, depending on who you wished to meet!)
Also, think twice before buying a greyhound, unless you like rising at 4am each morning to take the brute for a ten mile walk/jog before having to leave for work! They also have zero personality, and come to life only when chasing some unfortunate animal to kill! (When my sister's family moved to a new house, the first thing their greyhound did was to maul the neighbor's cat. It took a team of vetinary surgeons hours, working round the clock, to save the cat, and my sister received the huge bill!)
I would say a good "talking point" breed is a dachshund, but any small to medium sized, or at least friendly, dog would do.
Seconding all this. Legionaire is giving the strongest evidence-based advice right now for optimizing app based dating.
A couple of nuances:
1. NYC specifically is an Empyrean Valhalla for single men, because there are more college educated women age 20-28 than anywhere else (density), but also gender ratios are vastly on your side. If you take this advice as applying to moving to SF or LA or other large metros, it won't work nearly as well as NYC specifically.
Also, outside of this advice, which is specifically app-based, there is a broader strategic consideration - every single dating app has ~3 men for every woman, they're 75/25. Pure supply and demand arguments shows that this is a hugely unfavorable environment for the large amount of men who can't stand out, and who aren't top quintile or better.
This is driven by the fact that only ~20% of women use dating apps (40% try them, but half get The Ick and stop pretty soon).
The better way to meet and date women for those men is by doing interesting things in real life, in social groups, where women can get to know you and evaluate you over a longer term.
The hard part here (at least for most men) is that all their hobbies are 90/10 men/women and those 10 women are partnered up already. I know, I've always been that guy too, with 90%+ male-dominated hobbies and interests.
But it is then contingent upon you to undertake the effort and start doing things actual women enjoy. Dancing (ballroom, salsa, etc) is a great one, vastly imbalanced and always looking for men, as are things like yoga and aerials and cooking classes and "drunk painting" and things like that.
I have a number of posts that are relevant in this domain, but I'll just link one:
Speaking to point 7 and "optimal stopping," I do some monte carlo simulations and show that the formal Secretary Problem optimal stopping solution has you evaluating too many candidates, and that you're better off evaluating ~10-15% instead of 30%.
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/you-only-get-3-things-in-mate-optimization?r=17hw9h
While numbers may favor single men in New York that's unfortunately not the full story. The city is chock-full of high income, high achieving men, think finance bros for example, and a man of more modest income will have a really tough time competing. Things might have gotten a little better with so much of the financial sector relocating to Miami, but it might not yet be enough to be significant.
It wouldn't be as difficult for average men if it weren't for the fact that women tend to be patient when it comes to waiting for the perfect man to come along. It's common for men to think that women are willing to settle for average men when they realize it's taking longer than expected to find a perfect one, but that isn't true.
This is good advice.
I never had horrible problems dating in high population density areas because I am lucky enough to be moderately attractive with decent social skills. However, I basically optimized the above while living in a low density area to maximize dates to find wife material.
2-5 are the most easily actionable and should definitely be done. I felt pretty gay making a homemade tripod and setting it up in my backyard but it was worth it. I also felt lame paying for bumble/hinge premium but it was worth it.
I would also say if you really, really like someone, make sure a second date is set up ASAP, and ensure you let them know you really like them by the end of the second date.
I think in my case the thing was just realizing that it was a skill that I could develop through deliberate practice. And probably a secondary thing was realizing that there is some good advice out there, even though the vast majority of dating advice is complete dross.
How to get this deliberate practice? The apps are a soul sucking grind.
Uhhhh, I don't think there's one big thing or one big trick, other than the realization that everyone who comments on dating on the internet is bullshitting, mostly by sharing what they think should work instead of what does.
A few things that have worked for me and will (probably) work for you.
On the apps:
- Dress better. Definitely boots>sneakers and preferably suit over t-shirt. Some guys don't need good clothes to look good. Most guys do. Play the odds.
- Get good photos. Preferably from a professional photographer. AI might work these days, haven't tried it. Depressingly effective.
- Pay for the Premium thingy on the apps. It works.
- Get her off the app as fast as possible, preferably out for coffee the next day. Having a long chat on the app and getting to know each other there doesn't work and, in retrospect, is as dumb as it sounds.
In person:
I dunno, do you need advice? In mixed groups, relationships just kinda form organically over time and it's awesome. Unfortunately, those have been on the decline since "Bowling Alone" and the trends are not good.
>Having a long chat on the app and getting to know each other there doesn't work and, in retrospect, is as dumb as it sounds.
It absolutely works for me. But maybe it is different for those who look for BDSM subs and not romantic. That always takes weeks of negotiations. Still, I would probably do weeks of texting even if romantic, because I do not really believe in looks based chemistry but more like similar brains developing intellectual and organic chemistry.
Mixed groups are stupid, why would you you want your dating pool be like 15 people.
I just don't have any mixed groups, even though I belong to like 3 groups at present. Haven't found overlap between my interests and women.
An older woman who saw me again after some months recently said that I look way better now, like I'm positively glowing. And it's true, in those months I think I resolved a good chunk of inner discord. Which leads me to believe now I just need to be in the right room at the right time, although, I don't know what that right room would be.
Try going to arranged in person mingles, like those on meetup.com. Its not that youll necessarily gets lots of dates from these(though you might), but the practise of talking to a stranger and asking her out is useful and you can start deploying it in other contexts. A confident cold approach in a context where the woman is not being inundated with unwanted attention(like she is at a bar) can give good odds for the effort involved
I don’t know the modern landscape very well, but I do know that people respond to someone who seems comfortable, interested, and not like they’re trying to force an outcome. Just start with making female friends, maybe? One thing does lead to another sometimes.
What's your goal? At first I assumed you wanted to find a mate, then I wondered maybe you want to keep "dating" as an end, not a means to an end.
If your goal is the former, stop thinking in dating-terms. Truly see at as (one of many) means to an end, but stop giving a fuck about the process details. All its meant to do is make people meet, the rest follows (or not, for good reasons).
If the latter is your goal, I have no idea.
I want a mate yeah.
Sonder is a made-up word that means: the profound realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid, complex, and filled with personal stories as your own. I saw a woman on twitter horrified that this word exists: surely everyone realizes that as a child? Don't you have to be a horrible narcissist to not see this is true?
This amused me, because I have to admit that, even intellectually, I do not understand sonder, I have a hard time believing random people have a life as vivid and complex as my own. The personal stories, yes, that I believe, but then, I find personal stories boring, I even find my own personal stories boring.
Do you understand sonder? Or actually, something I'm especially interested in: what's the most intense experience of sonder you've ever had? A time someone really surprised you with how complex their life is?
The idea that *every* random passerby is living a life *just* as vivid, complex, and filled with personal stories as everyone else is extremely silly!
Aphantasia is a real thing.
So are comparative intelligence and trauma and agoraphobia and every other condition and life experience that would inform one's experience of vividness, one's complexity, and one's wealth of personal stories.
It would be more accurate to say that "any random passerby *MIGHT* be living a life as vivid, complex, and filled with personal stories as your own, but you can't know who."
Both the person who made up the word sonder and the woman on Twitter who was horrified not everyone believed it are narcissists imposing their understanding of themselves on everyone else.
I don't see how it can be narcissistic to assume that you're the median for internal richness.
It's narcissistic to assume your internal richness is universal.
That's like saying it's narcissistic to assume other people are as smart as me.
Narcissism is about assuming you're special and important and other people don't matter. It might be stupid in some way to assume other people are generally like you, but it's not "narcissistic".
You're describing grandiosity, which sometimes intersects with narcissism, but does not define narcissism.
Many narcissists are deeply absorbed with how terrible they are, typified by this quote by Anne LaMott:
"I'm the piece of shit the world revolves around."
Sure, technically grandiosity is not a requirement. But which of the nine current diagnostic criteria is remotely in line with "believing other people are like you"?
"A belief that he or she is special and unique[...]"?
"A lack of empathy (unwillingness to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others)"?
"A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes"?
Thinking that you have a rich internal life far beyond that of most people is definitionally a lot more like narcissism than the converse.
Freaky Friday speaks of this [0].
And yeah, you can find sonder all the time if you just actively listen to people without imposing an agenda.
E.g. I remember several months ago, I was speaking with my uncle at a family gathering. He's a retired chef with a bunch of accolades. And we got into a very long conversation about the culinary arts, despite me having 0 knowledge in it. And then later, I saw him at Christmas. Out of the blue, he asked me if I knew anything about bitcoin. And I'm not an evangelist by any means, but he knew I was vaguely nerdy. So we had another lengthy chat, and I explained to him what I knew at a level he could understand, and he was really impressed.
edit: wait, I remember the *mostest* sonder experience. It was when I was working in retail, and a coworker started telling me about his plans about the zombie apocalypse. At first, I assumed he was being ironic. But he kept going on, and on, and on. About how he's gonna hide out in the local school, and then drive to alaska with his friends because it's cold, and how bolt-actions are more efficient than machine guns, and idek. He just kept going on and on and on. Eventually, it became clear that he was not joking. He'd spent far too much time thinking about this subject for the topic to have been fascetious.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaky_Friday_(2003_film)
>Sonder is a made-up word
It is a real German word meaning "special"
That may be the origin of the word. The original video from Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (as far as I know, the source of the word) uses an English pronunciation (rhymes with "yonder" and with what in German would be a double s).
https://youtu.be/AkoML0_FiV4
Makes sense, though, since it's the realization that everyone is "special".
When I had to understand my mother so I could stop hating her. It was hard work.
>I saw a woman on twitter horrified that this word exists: surely everyone realizes that as a child? Don't you have to be a horrible narcissist to not see this is true?
When my daughter was still a preschooler and showed no need for privacy I'd sometimes ask her what she was thinking. And her answers always surprised me. One I remember especially well came up one time when we were in the car on our way somewhere, probably a playground. I asked what she was thinking, and she was thinking about a character in a cartoon she had seen -- wondering what would he do in some situation. The specificity, the absolute unguessability, of what she had been thinking startled me. I realized that I had had the feeling I knew the general sort of mental content she had. I knew what she had done all morning with me, and a lot she had told or showed me about how she thought and felt. I knew what she liked about the park. And I was driving along with the idea that that stuff was pretty much all of her mental content -- today's events so far, what the park was going to be like. But in fact she was thinking of something unrelated. I knew my own thoughts weren't related in any simple way to what we'd done that day and what we were about to do. They were probably a mishmash of that stuff, current hopes and worries and plans, and random other topics -- Chernobyl, mortality, that thing Jan said one time, sex . . . But it hadn't been real to me that her thoughts were the same kind of mishmash, except with topics from her store of hopes and interests and experiences instead of mine.
I am still prone to the same error. My default view of other people's experience is way too simple, especially if they are strangers. If I see them in the grocery store, I think of them as thinking about their groceries. Yet I know, really, that their mental content is as diverse as mine. Even if I'm with a close friend I make smaller versions of the same kind of error. If we're having dinner and talking, I think of them as thinking about whatever we're talking about, what we're eating, and me. I'm more aware of some nuances though. If they look sad or worried while we're talking, I know that some concern they don't want to bring up is crossing their mind. And of course I myself have lots of thought unrelated to what we are talking about.
It is very hard to stay fully aware of the complexity of other people, and how much of what is in their minds is unguessable. I think we're wired to default to a simplified view of what's going on in their minds. That woman on twitter exclaiming with horror about sonder was just performing a standard twitter move -- a certain kind of putdown. Either that or she was a terrible phenomenologist.
Great comment, thanks. I think I'm going to start asking "what are you thinking about right now?" every time there is a pause in a conversation with someone.
Here’s a funny story about that. I’m going to PT for a back problem, and recently my PT saw me frowning while doing an exercise and asked whether it hurt. Actually I was frowning because I was fretting about how to get cat throw-up out of a green fake fur throw I have. So I told him that, and he looked quite startled, then laughed. You never know what you’ll hear!
I was at a meetup recently where several people earnestly insisted that this WASN'T true, to my amusement.
They were expressing that because it indeed isn't true!
Hahahaha. What was the meetup about?
It was a generic rationalist meetup.
You know, I can believe the average rationalist has an inner life that is genuinely more complex than most people's. You don't think that's true?
I feel like that's too self-congratulatory of a take for me to have. But the vibe at the meetup was more of "most people are just dumb NPCs".
I think the division might be in understanding that its true in the abstract vs interacting with ppl as though its true. The listen to ppl instead of waiting for your turn to talk thing. Honestly i cant say I really do that. But I imagine that some of the extremely friendly and empathic ppl out there are just actualizing sonder.
It usually happens to me when the scale is suddenly reduced. When you ride a crowded subway train at 8am every day, it's hard to treat people around you as more than NPC. But when you find yourself on the 6am train on a Sunday, you look at the five people in the car with you and can't help but wonder what's their story is, why did they have to take the first train of the day.
Or when you look at the highway outside your apartment at 23:55 on the 31st of December and see a few cars drive by. Who are these people? Why are they not at home with their families?
I sincerely hope people's lives are vastly more vivid and story-filled than mine. I've got like twenty years I can look back on and say, "I don't think anything happened there."
Pedantry: all words are made up
Substance: "*Exactly* as vivid and complex" might not be true, but biologically your brain should work similarly to other human brains. I don't think that not realizing this makes you a horrible narcissist, any more than committing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error does. Most of us realize that other people *are people* when still young. That doesn't mean that you think deeply about the consequences of that realization, especially in terms of what it means for other people's internal experiences. By the time you *could* do that, intellectually, it's probably long after you have the aforementioned realization, and it just becomes a background assumption you don't interrogate further. I might even just describe it as "reframing something you already know" rather than a wholly new idea.
And I don't think that generally selfish behavior is a result of not realizing this, either. Rather, people just don't *care* or think of themselves as being more important.
(Actually, I'm not sure if even narcissists don't think of other people as people, rather they assume that everyone else is as self-interested as they are, and are just lying when they say they care about others.)
I think my brain doesn't work similarly to most humans. I'm a software developer and I read a lot, that already means it's gonna work pretty differently from most people.
That's a minuscule difference compared to all the ways that human brains work similarly. All humans share > 99% of their DNA, no matter how unusual they are.
Let's hear it, how am I similar to other people then?
Did you even read my comment?
I did, I concluded the most efficient counter is to ask you the specific ways in which I'm 99% identical to other humans (since it's apparently something all humans share).
I don’t think most people experience this “sonder”. If they did it would not allow them to think and act as they do (in particular with regard to how large a role tribal identity plays in the typical person’s consciousness). In fact maybe experiencing it constantly would be maladaptive, though there’s something to be said for being able to turn it on instantly whenever it seems appropriate.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows!
🛸 updates:
• Last week the federal government registered the domain aliens.gov and alien.gov. It was apparently not referring to aliens in the immigration sense. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/19/alien-gov-homeland-security-new-website/89224417007/
"In a statement provided to USA TODAY on March 19, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said, "Stay tuned!" including an alien emoji" [👽] after her message.
Will be interesting to see how Bayesians update their priors on assimilating the new evidence.
• Gen. McCasland (ret.) remains missing from his New Mexico home. (which I've covered in recent OT's). And like something out of The Three Body Problem, folks in the space have been identifying other scientists or engineers with strange disappearances or untimely demises over the past year or so, with the case of one Monica Reza, JPL scientist, featuring most prominently. https://www.newsnationnow.com/missing/william-mccasland-search-monica-reza/
• And if your ontology has been giving you that discomfiting feeling that 'hmm maybe it's possible I've been missing something', now would be opportune to start orienting yourself. You could do worse than by studying my substack (just passed 400 subs, w00t!) - entry point last week's article https://blockedepistemology.substack.com/p/the-may-johnson-plot-thickens .
N̶o̶r̶m̶i̶e̶s̶ newbies will have no idea what's going on from it alone, but I provide handholds in the form of links & keywords in context to help you start getting your 'wait what is this, what is that' questions answered.
And there's a silent Dungeons & Dragons reference in there, so there's that.
• UPDATE 25-May
(as sub-comment): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-426/comment/233440120
My Reddit posting on same garnered 50k views and over 500 upvotes. https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1s3yns6/these_5_members_of_national_archives_public/
• UPDATE 28-May
last night (Friday) Bill Maher dedicated his weekly New Rules bit to the UAP disclosure topic. Did he support it? Did he debunk it? One way to find out, but (outside of willfully avoiding) let's see if you can keep your priors from updating over it ↙️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=42BAVjdUyd8
I'd really want to see a list of equally prominent people connected to some random issue--say garbage collection--perhaps measured by words of media exposure * likes or some similar metric that isn't too corrupt, and how many of them have had mysterious disappearances, or disappearances that can be spun as mysterious, before I start thinking conspiracy.
And yeah I learned that here and from Scott Adams.
>I'd really want to see a list of equally prominent people connected to some random issue--say garbage collection...and how many of them have had mysterious disappearances, or disappearances that can be spun as mysterious, before I start thinking conspiracy.
Yes, I agree with that methodology & I applaud the presence of mind that introduces it! 👍
That said, McCasland alone with his background is enough to put me at over 50% that either he has left his home & evading authorities (especially AFOSI, who've been rather close-lipped on their angle & approach in this matter) for *reasons*, or (slightly less likely in my view) foul play. I don't need to see if a garbage collection person ever disappeared under similar circumstances to arrive at those odds.
Update 25-Mar. About three hours ago, the X account for National Archives' Public Interest Declassification Board, or PIDB, put out a quote-tweet with no comment. Rather, it contained the (in)famous Roswell photo of Jesse Marcel holding weather balloon material from 1947, alongside a picture of the bipartisan PIDB staff.
https://x.com/PublicDeclass/status/2036958884989198650?s=20
It quote-tweeted their otherwise relatively innocuous message of last week:
"The PIDB visited Archives II in College Park today. We met with members of the National Declassification Center and digitization teams, who are doing an incredible job. We also visited the classified archives.
Stay tuned for additional updates on this visit."
In broad terms, Archives II is the declassified, publicly-accessible archives site, while Archives I is for still-classified content and publicly inaccessible.
There was a joke about how the government couldn’t possibly be hiding aliens because Trump would brag about them, it will be very funny if this comes true.
I have a hard time imagining him not blabbing if he knew something interesting.
2025 inoculating take: Trump would brag about them
2026 inoculating take: Trump would use it to deflect from Epstein files.
Neither invalid, IMO. But (within scope of either year) – – two things can be true.
Given that it's the Trump administration registering these domains, my update is negative to zero.
By way of parallel example, curious whether your take on covid origins updated across his espousing the lab leak origin (either in his 1st term, or again last year)?
Yes, in a very minor way. My chanc3 on lab leak wasn't very high to begin with, but Trump supporting it pushed it down maybe half a percent, if I had to put a number on it?
Careful unless you have a causal explanation why Trump endorsement makes it less likely - reverse stupidity is not intelligence
Not causal, only a perceived correlation. If I had a causal explanation I would update a lot more.
Fair enough, I haven't thought of Trump's statements perhaps being actually anticorrelated with the facts.
Not the person you responded to, but I actually think it does make a lab cover-up less likely by making it more likely that some alleged evidence in favor was fabricated or exaggerated, especially if said evidence came from a US government source while Trump was president. And I think we already know of at least 1 example, the "3 sick researchers at WIV."
I actually feel that’s an especially valid take, one I’ve anticipated ever since the ‘President is gonna Disclose’ meme went into high gear after the Age of Disclosure docu released in November last year (thank you producer Dan Farrah, for both the docu & lighting off the meme). The politicization of Disclosure helps no one.
Self-Promotion Post™ from the reasoning of "haven't been active in the ratsphere for a little while, but have paid dues (e.g. 2024 book review finalist) and have had people in the comments section interested in reading my writing before". I wrote recently on how a lot of 'misinformation' is a consequence of people having poor mental models of people with very different beliefs to themselves:
https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/maybe-its-your-fault-when-you-fall
Separately: I've spent a lot of time lately in a mostly-unselected internet community, i.e. one that doesn't have the intense sociocultural pressures behind it that core rationalism does. It's interesting. I feel like as I return to writing, I need to scaffold my ideas much more heavily than I might have before. Not that people can't understand the ideas, but that I need to go a couple layers out in background knowledge to clarify what I mean. (This intertwines with mostly-unselected-internet-communities skewing young -- more people who haven't built up a wide general knowledge bank yet, especially for knowledge in obscure high-investment internet communities.)
You brush off the thought of otherkin being an "identity", but... isn't that the core of this issue? Identity? These conflicts only come into existence because of schisms within the population. Some are unavoidable, such as sex, but those can be managed with hierarchy. Other unnecessary differences can be eliminated entirely. In that sense, this current reaction by society is not maladaptive at all, but is actually an adaptive reaction that serves to restore society to a more stable equilibrium. True peace will only come through consensus.
Possibly confirming part of your last paragraph, I got stuck on the otherkin section as I had no real knowledge of that community or the terminology. I don't know a structural solution as it probably requires too much explanation to provide the required context and would distract from the main essay.
"and when they fall for “misinformation” or “Poe’s law” they’re often falling for themselves."
This should be:
"and when they fall for “misinformation” or “Poe’s law” they’re often falling for *it* themselves."?
"Falling for themselves" was a rhetorical device -- they're falling for their own perceptions. Possibly could've been written out further.
> with mentors from Harvard, ETH, MATS, AI:FAR, etc.
...AI:FAR? Is that different from FAR.ai?
Someday wealthy people will be able to afford killer drones. For all I know some already own them. In the US does the right to bear arms give people the right to own and use killer drones, so long as they’re not autonomous? So, like, drones made by the good folk at Anthropic.
To address how your question evolved in the comments below:
If a killer drone is directly replacing a handheld firearm, with the same rules around acceptable use of force under imminent threat of grave injury or death...sure! Why not?
However, that "imminent" part is really key.
You can shoot your stalker ex-boyfriend when he breaks into your home brandishing a machete already covered in the blood of your pet cat (well, maybe not in California); but you can't send a contract killer to shoot the same stalker in his sleep, not even if both acts *feel* like self-defense. A drone that shoots or blows up a machete-wielding intruder isn't spiritually any different from stopping said intruder with a handheld firearm.
Many self-defense shootings are minutely examined to the second to determine when use of deadly force became appropriate and when it stopped. Sometimes a shooter's freedom and personal wealth relies on them firing on their assailant a half-second before the assailant begins to turn away, so that slow motion playback doesn't make it look like they "deliberately" shot someone "in the back."
Drones would be under exactly the same laws around self-defense. It's impossible to make an argument for killing someone to protect yourself from imminent deadly harm when they aren't even on your block.
Maybe there could be some hybrid man/machine type robot that could have all the physical advantages of a machine, but the judgement and discerning eye of an adult human. Seems like that would have great law enforcement potential, almost like a ...Robo...cop.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/
They would likely fail the "common use" and "dangerous and unusual" tests. I also suspect that it's not consistent with what "bear" means, which I think has been interpreted to mean carried by a person.
Also consider that deadly force is only justified when a life is at risk. It's hard to make that claim when the drone operator is secure in his operating room. There was a case in 70's where a farm owner set up a tripwire-activated shotgun that injured an intruder and the court held that using deadly force to defend property isn't justified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney
Drones aren't particularly expensive. However, you need to register with the FAA to operate a drone heavier than half a pound in the US: https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/become_a_drone_pilot
Other countries have similar regulations.
Do you think there is something specific about drones in particular that will make "wealthy people" get up in the morning and choose violence when, today, with the weapons available to them right now, they do not?
>Do you think there is something specific about drones in particular that will make "wealthy people" get up in the morning and choose violence when, today, with the weapons available to them right now, they do not?
Absolutely. I believe all wealthy people are reincarnations of Ted Bundy, and that unless wealthy killer drone owners wear their tinfoil hats consistently the drone's vibrations will crack the Bundy-suppressant crystal structure in the owner's wealthy vas deferens and the man will pop out of the owner's wealthy penis.
With sufficiently advanced drones, a wealthy man could build their own robo army. Maybe they could use it to conquer territory/cities in a third world country.
I mean, not really. You cannot build your own parallel military without being instantly vaporised by the government, no matter how rich you are, but especially not with drones which are highly regulated and require very sophisticated manpower and logistics. And even very small third world countries operate expensive militaries which are really only possible with yearly taxes, not one-time large fees.
The conventional view on this kind of thing, generalizing from "air power" generally, is that it can't hold ground.
I mean, depends on the third world country. In the parts of the world where that's actually a feasible goal, the traditional child soldiers are cheaper. Elsewhere, we have two examples happening right now to demonstrate that even if you're literally in charge of a large country with, allegedly, a functional military, it can still be much harder to get another state to do what you want than the sycophants you've surrounded yourself with might claim.
Someday? Wealthy people? How expensive do you think such a "killer drone" would be?
Either you don't know how much guns cost, how much drones cost, or you're vastly overestimating how much it would cost to integrate the two.
Yeah I don’t know what that stuff costs. But whether the really effective ones would cost huge sums or can be bought at Walmart of $399 isn’t really relevant to the question, right?
I think it is. You opened with "Someday wealthy people will be able to afford," which heavily implies it's not already quite cheap and accessible today.
But my question was whether owning one of these devices was covered by the second amendment. How does the fact that I was wrong about the price of the things matter?
Can we expect to see a new Darwin award nomination before long? "An enterprising fellow called Eremolalos was experimenting with a gun tied to a drone, when his finger slipped on the controls. This caused the drone to make a sharp turn and fire the gun, which killed him instantly!"
Attach an already legal to own gun (according to your 2nd amendment) to a legal drone and go shoot someone.
Ukraine is doing that kind of stuff since years, every single damned day. It's already possible and practically trivial, with an inquiring mind and some tinkering.
I imagine a case could be made that operating a drone with an attached gun would mean the latter is not properly under the owner's control, seeing as drones can go haywire and be mis-steered or run out of juice.
While legal individually, combining them – or almost certainly having either with the intent of combining them – would be deemed unprotected.
Or the fact that it's much easier to tie a small blasting charge to a cheap off the shelf drone.
The sub-0.55lb ones won't lift much, and once you're in the heavier territory just ramming someone with the thing is probably already enough tbh - which is why they are regulated
It doesn't take much high explosive in close proximity to give someone/something a Really Bad Day. A piece of semtex the size of a sugar lump can blow a horse in half!
I had a co-worker who died after a drone he was flying hit his head. It was one of those small, cheap plastic drones, but even a relatively light tap on the brain case can cause a hematoma that leads to death. He was in coma for a few days before he died.
Sorry to hear, but also interesting to hear. I guess drones will come with a required-to-wear-a-hard-hat sign soon?
This was early in the hobbyist drone craze. But last year, there was a big drone show in China where thousands of drones dropped out of the sky. Initially, jamming was blamed, but later it turned out to be a command-and-control glitch. No injuries were reported, but there could have been...
What I have in mind is a drone that can roam around searching for the person, recognize them in a crowd, then notify user, and kill the person when user gives the order to do so.
In that scenario, the right to bear arms would be the least of the owner's issues.
I'd bet the hardest part of this if you want to get away with it would be the "notify user and wait for confirmation." :D
I could explain how you might feasibly achieve the rest, but I remember YOU had some strong objections when I was doing something analogous in response to someone else's musings, so I'll wait until you (or someone else) ask more explicitly.
I cannot understand why people are talking about practical matters such as how someone could build their own using devices available now, whether you can kill somebody by just flying a damn drone into their head, how rich you have to be to buy one that will work, the possibility that a rich man could build a robo army, whether I think the possibility of being a killer drone owner will make wealthy people will develop a taste for killing, whether it's cheaper to hire child soldiers than to use killer drones, etc etc. That is all beside the point. My question was *whether the right to bear arms covered the right to own and use a killer drone*.
WTF? Did the fact that my question mentioned wealth, tech, and killing somehow trigger a brief reactive psychosis in you people responding?
Let me rephrase my question as a thought experiment: Say there is a technology that allows a person to remotely operate a drone with the following characteristics: It can search for a particular person using information online such as the address of their workplace, information about their location provided by user, and photos that allow it to recognize the person. It can kill someone, but only right when the user gives the command. Let's say the law regarding when you can use lethal force against someone is unchanged: If you are a civilian, you must have good reason to believe you are in imminent danger of death or severe harm. So the question is: Is owning one of these devices covered by the second amendment.
half serious response to
>My question was _whether the right to bear arms covered the right to own and use a killer drone. _
Not in California - since at least parts of the state barely allow citizens to own firearms.
> Is owning one of these devices covered by the second Amendment.
No.
By the current standard, it wouldn't be in "common use." Also using them probably doesn't count as "bearing" either.
I, and I expect others, figured this question was so uninteresting as literally posed that you must have been using it as a rhetorical device to ask about the current state of drone-based weapons generally.
It's likely an unanswerable question until it is answered by a court. This happens a lot with new tech/constellations that were simply not within the scope of thought of the original laws.
AI news:
(1) AI is being used in current war. Possibly throws more light on the row between Anthropic and the Department of War:
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2026/0322/1564555-ai-warfare-iran/
(2) Val Kilmer's corpse is going to be dug up and turned into a puppet for a new movie. Well, more that his image is going to be AI-generated. A lot of people are not happy about the idea, and I see their point: this is not a case of fixing up a few scenes where the bulk of the work had been done by the real person, or adding in something post-production after the actor's death. This is a golem, possibly, but it's totally fake.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/val-kilmer-s-controversial-ai-resurrection-sparks-backlash-as-fans-fume-it-should-be-illegal/ar-AA1Z4mgo?cvid=69c130470af04a92a43e0383e160dab0&ocid=hpmsn
The one about using AI on your dead mum's recorded speech the produce an AudioMum you could go to for wisdom, comfort and company bothered me a lot more.
I love the actor thing because it lowers the status of actual actors. Hopefully in 20 years all movies will be completely CGI and we won't have to listen to beautiful high school dropouts lecture us about the state of the rainforests anymore.
There are lots of really gifted actors who don’t go on about those things. But it will happen. Authenticity is a state of mind…
This is bad because it will hurt human actors who need to eat.
This is good because eventually Peter Lorre and Bella Lugosi will return, as was promised.
Not sure there would be a huge current demand for Béla.
You cannot know that up front, of course.
> This is bad because it will hurt human actors who need to eat.
For 95% of actors this won't change anything because they're supported by their food service jobs anyway. For the other 5% who are fully professional, this just reduces them to the status of their table-waiting colleagues.
RE Val Kilmer, didn't the Star Wars sequels already do something similar with several actors, including Peter Cushing?
It was a prequel (Rogue One) but yes, Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher (the latter was alive but no longer looked nineteen).
I guess would be the first movie to do it with an actual main character though rather than just for a couple of scenes. I guess Val Kilmer just happens to be in the sweet spot between "famous enough to be recognisable" and "his estate will actually let us do it" and "died young enough that people still remember him as a young man".
Alien: Romulus ginned up an AI cameo Ian Holm.
The Flash movie conjured up a bunch of old Superman actors.
I hesitated to post this because at first I thought this could easily be (a) a hoax or (b) explained away by a "sailing stone" mechanism (like the ice-assisted rock movement we see in Death Valley and the Empty Quarter of Arabia). Anyway, we've got a series of two pictures from one of the Mars Rover expeditions, of what looks like a "rock" slowly moving behind some other rocks.
I find it difficult to believe this is a hoax because both of these photos appear in the Wayback Machine, posted by NASA from one of the Mars Rover probes, and they were subsequently taken down. If the photos are doctored, someone from NASA must have done the doctoring (unless there's a way to inject false links into the Wayback Machine).
The sailing stone mechanism of rock movement in deserts requires a fairly flat surface, and the stones do push up a thin wedge of sand on either side of their path. That mechanism wouldn't work in this terrain. Plus, sailing stones require that there be enough water to form an icy surface on the sand. We don't seem to have that out in the open on the surface of Mars.
https://marsishaunted.substack.com/p/something-is-moving-on-mars
Before...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220519134426/https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/2/n/1833/2N289093752EFFB074P1985L0M1.JPG
After...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210125234334/https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/2/n/1843/2N289976994EFFB0EOP0675L0M1.JPG
Sailing Stones...
https://www.geologyin.com/2017/07/death-valleys-moving-rocks.html
I got interested in this and did a little poking around. Two photos are shown. What’s not mentioned is that they are 1/2 of a stereo pair designed to give a 3-D image where you can accurately position things and calculate distance properly. also they were taken on two different days from two very different positions. The resolution is shockingly low even from the beginning. Those cameras had 1024 x 1024 pixel sensors - plus pics may have been compressed even further in order to download them from the Rover to earth. I would absolutely not explain this by moving rocks, I would explain this by Optics. The whole thing reminds me of that famous film, Blow Up.
The images remain available. Nothing to see here, as usual.
https://planetarydata.jpl.nasa.gov/w10n/mer/mer2no_0xxx/browse/sol1833/edr/
https://planetarydata.jpl.nasa.gov/w10n/mer/mer2no_0xxx/browse/sol1833/edr/2n289093752effb074p1985l0m1.img.jpg
https://planetarydata.jpl.nasa.gov/w10n/mer/mer2no_0xxx/browse/sol1843/edr/
https://planetarydata.jpl.nasa.gov/w10n/mer/mer2no_0xxx/browse/sol1843/edr/2n289976994effb0eop0675l0m1.img.jpg
Also: "Last modified 2009" LOL. These images are ancient.
Looks like the photos were taken at different angles/by different cameras. Like looking with one eye closed, then switching to the other eye. That makes things appear to 'jump'.
Yes, they're taken from slightly different angles, but the jump should affect the foreground rocks more than that background rock. :-)
Also, in the "before" image, there's a black tip of a rock sticking out from behind the sand dune on the left, approximately where the "migrating" rock shows up in the "after" image. I thought the "migrating" rock in the "after" image may have been revealed by raising the camera higher to see behind the dune. But then the "migrating" rock in the "before" image is missing. So, I no longer buy the perspective change arguments. <mental shrug>
Parallax and change of perspective is highly plausible to me. It seems like the Rover drove a slight circle around the obscuring rock, making it even easier to see the "moving" rock.
https://imgur.com/a/gok7KaE
Original images here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-426/comment/232346054
The camera on the rover was at fixed height. Its movement was limited to pitch and rotate on its mast.
https://www.planetary.org/space-images/mer-diagram
https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/media/documents/MER_Cameras.pdf
This might be a blue dress gold dress thing. At first this just looks like how I'd expect a moving camera to percieve this scene? But if I squint I can sort of make the circled rock feel much smaller and much closer to the camera and then I can see how it would be 'moving'
I'm not an expert, but I think it's difficult to say exactly what the expected change is without knowing more about how the pictures were taken. In a simple parallax situation--say, driving along a straight, flat road--the foreground appears to move faster. But these pictures seem different in a number of ways. There clearly *is* a significant difference in perspective by looking at the larger rocks nearby. It looks like the zoom or elevation might be different as well.
Actually, now that I look at the "full-size, unedited" versions... I don't see anything that looks like the "zoomed in Sol 1833." In fact just looking at those 2 pictures, nothing looks mysterious at all. The "moving rock" section is far away and blurry, and I don't see anything that doesn't feel like it can't be explained with a change in perspective + low photo quality.
Then it must be the Martians! 😁
I wish the answer were more obvious. I even dreamed about leathery Martian rocks moving across the Martian desert last night. This is the first time any of my dreams were in an off-Earth setting. My subconscious must be obsessing over this. No criticism of those responding to my post, but I wish there were an explanation that worked better. Looking at the rocks, the parallax/perspective explanation doesn't seem to cut it. I was hoping that one of the many brainiacs on this forum would chime in with a known geological principle or something to explain the difference. ;-)
I'm not a brainiac, and my visual intuition on this matches yours. But I think our perceptions may be explained by the 'moving' rock being significantly further away (from the camera, and from the foreground rocks) than it looks.
We're seeing it as a set of roughly similar-sized rocks relatively close to each other, and so the parallax explanation doesn't seem to make any sense. But if the moving rock is actually quite big and quite far behind the others, then it does.
I still struggle to actually see it that way! And I'd love a more detailed explanation of how the illusion is happening. But it seems to be the most likely explanation.
What are some ways in which people who settled down away from their parents handle needing to support their parents as they age past the point of independence? (Either at the point where the parents are living in their own home but require more assistance, or at the point where a full-time assisted living facility gets involved.) Does this require larger families where one of the adult kids stays local? Moving back to the parents' city? Moving the parents to one of the kids' cities? Managing it remotely with frequent travel?
Tangentially related, I know it's relatively common for seniors to spend some of their time in a different state (e.g. going to Arizona for a month or three every winter): is there a standard guide on how the logistics for that works? E.g. if you're moving away from your house in winter, you can't just leave it unattended because pipes might freeze, so is there an industry around taking care of people's houses while they're gone the same way that there's an industry around pet-sitting?
It’s incredibly hard, especially when the parents are on another continent. One of the best arguments for having multiple kids.
Well you've just given the main options yourself... which ones can work for you will really depend on the specifics of the case: 1) move to be close to them, 2) move them to be close to you, 3) pay someone else to do the bulk of the care and travel when you can. I've done bits of all three already...
To answer the tangental question -- you can hire a "house-sitter". There are probably agencies for that, but in my experience people just hire local university students (who like having a house to stay in, so they don't need to be paid much)
There are also property management companies, or similar smaller-scale versions of that (i.e. a handyman) who will do that stuff; these have a slight edge over “local university student” because they tend to understand a home’s systems better and how to fix issues that may arise.
This is also one reason that empty-nesters well off enough to have two homes, who are in a northern climate during the warm months and want to keep that part, will often sell the house that they raised their kids in and buy a condo or townhome in the same metro.
The central part of Chicago, where I live, has many such households. For a condo the off-season property management is built-in, and most rows of townhomes also have some version of an HOA (can be rather minimalist in its operations). There might be an outdoor patio spigot that you have to turn the water off to before decamping south for the season but that's about it. I know several such couples and they all regard wintertime HOA dues as basically a cost of doing business of the winters in Arizona.
I'm visiting San Francisco first week of April and I'm interested finding some of these legendary Bay Area house parties that Scott writes about. But of course that's difficult when you're not already part of the scene. Appreciate any pointers or recommendations.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hDefuqC2Rbnr8THYW/index-of-rationalist-groups-in-the-bay-area-july-2024
I tried some vibe coding with Claude this weekend, and it was a lot of fun.
It wasn't perfect of course, the glass is still only about 85% full, so I am obviously not going to convince the skeptics. There were indeed moments when I had to look into the source code and suggest a general idea of a fix. But those moments were rare, compared to the amount of generated functionality.
The project is not ready yet, but maybe a week or two later I will put the first version online and share a link here. It will be an introduction to programming for little kids. Imagine code.org but simplified a lot. But also with a few new ideas. Yeah, I realize the irony, but the process is so much fun that I don't care about the ultimate meaninglessness.
It was an interesting experience. It requires a lot of humility to admit (not verbally in an online discussion, but by your actual actions in private) that the AI is simply a more efficient coder than a mere mortal who spent a few decades coding. To realize that most of the time the most efficient way to solve a problem is to type "solve this" in the chat window. Today, I am still sometimes needed to guide the AI and show it a way over some obstacles. A year later, probably not even this will be true.
(Meanwhile, in my day job, I am still waiting for the permission to use Copilot. Given the speed of our corporate processes, we will probably all be converted to paperclips before I get it.)
It would probably be rational to quit, vibecode lots of stuff, and try selling some of it, before the market gets completely flooded by other people who have realized the same thing and had the same skills. Unfortunately, I was never good at selling. All my projects end with "...and then I will, uhm, post it online so that people can use it freely".
Here is a preview, but it's work in progress and at this moment it temporarily uses emojis instead of actual pictures:
http://bur.sk/2026/code/
I started vibe coding in the last couple weeks also. I made a collection of chrome-dino-runner themed classic arcade games, along with AIs that play them: dino.lilwg.com
It was really fun. It was great to just throw out ideas and try things without having to do a lot of tedious coding.
I also did a machine learning demo of balancing a single and double pendulum: cartpole.lilwg.com. It does all the training in the browser in javascript. It was a good way for me to learn some history and algorithms in reinforcement learning.
Man that's an awesome site, thanks so much for sharing. I really enjoyed messing around and the visualizations are super cool :)
Lots of interesting thoughts there, with a few responses from me
1. "Yeah, I realize the irony, but the process is so much fun that I don't care about the ultimate meaninglessness."
There appears to be general consensus that building with Claude is a lot of fun, which I fully agree with. Unfortunately this is resulting in a lot of stuff getting built that isn't useful. In many ways the old adage is more relevant than ever: "Figuring out what to build is more important than how to build it."
2. "To realize that most of the time the most efficient way to solve a problem is to type "solve this" in the chat window."
It does seem like we're heading in this direction, though your portrayal of the situation hints at how it falls apart in the limit. Take this to the extreme. If every problem in the world can be solved with "AI, solve this for me", then do problems still exist? Doesn't that mean we live in a utopia? More realistically, there will always be problems on the vanguard that are novel and not one-shotable. Those are likely the problems most worth your time to target, insofar as humans are useful in solving them. This paradigm applies to everything from "the best way to build this software stack" to "how to find happiness."
3. "It would probably be rational to quit, vibecode lots of stuff, and try selling some of it, before the market gets completely flooded by other people who have realized the same thing and had the same skills."
Sorry to tell you that we crossed this threshold long, long ago. Maybe even before AI coding. Anybody who has tried to start their own business building and selling software will tell you that the selling part is always the early bottleneck. The discrepancy is simply growing now that the cost of building is going to zero.
You seem to have a somewhat fixed-mindset thought pattern of "i've never been good at selling, only building." I think that framing is a bit counterproductive, because there's more to innovation than just selling and building. Figuring out "what" is the hard part, and figuring out if anybody will buy it is a strong albeit not complete signal as to whether it's important. No matter where you work or what you do, the question of "what" to build is becoming the dominant one for everybody. Just remember, like all skills, it is something you can work on and improve. Give yourself the credit and space to improve this skill in an age of rapid building.
To close the loop, if nobody is using your "learn-to-code" tool, does that mean you're bad at selling? Or does it just mean the world just doesn't need another "learn-to-code" tool? How is it meaningfully better than what's out there and in what way? Or is it just an outlet for you wanting to build something? If you find answers to these critical questions, then you are one step closer to figuring out what the world really wants.
> Unfortunately this is resulting in a lot of stuff getting built that isn't useful.
Arguably, all my free-time projects are building stuff that isn't very useful, only now I got more efficient at producing them.
Sometimes I tell myself that the actual benefit is learning and practicing my skills, so that when one day I find a worthy challenge, I will be prepared. That... kinda worked for me in the past -- I did something quite useless, learned some skills, later used those skills e.g. at work -- but I am probably doing too much exploration and too little exploitation. Especially now when I already have many skills and I am getting old.
> You seem to have a somewhat fixed-mindset thought pattern of "i've never been good at selling, only building."
Anything can be learned, but learning requires time and attention, and with a full-time job and two kids there is not much time left... and if I spend that time learning how to sell things, I won't spend it learning how to use an AI, or thinking about what to build.
Also, selling is not my comparative advantage; I am actually more at the opposite end of the scale. It would take me a lot of time and effort to become merely average.
> Or does it just mean the world just doesn't need another "learn-to-code" tool?
Now, in the age of vibecoding, it does not. Five years ago, the situation would be different. I have tried to find similar tools for my kids... there are many great solutions that got one or the other thing right, but I haven't yet seen any that would get *all* of those things right. Plus I have a few ideas of my own.
However, five years ago, all my free time would not be sufficient to build such thing in a year. And I probably couldn't convince anyone to pay my bills while I am working on it full time, because... I suck at selling, and that includes selling myself.
The plan is: (1) complete the tool just to have my old ideas materialize in some form, even if that is no longer needed for most people, because it will make me happy; and then (2) use the skills I have obtained that way to take on some more meaningful project.
Love everything you said, and wishing you all the best! You sound like a fun person to get a beer with.
Just one thing I want to emphasize again: "selling" is not the end all be all of turning an idea into something useful, even if building is free. I really enjoyed your story of trying lots of learning tools for your kids, building the one you want your kids to use, maybe letting some friends try it with their kids, and seeing what works. No cold-emailing or handshakes involved, just trial and error and experimentation. That's innovation! And if it works great, then i'd be excited to try it when my kids are the right age too.
Best of luck!
Thanks! I appreciate you calling me out for doing something that the world does not need, so today I made this instead:
http://bur.sk/2026/add/
Literally one evening's work, although based on a previous hand-made page:
http://bur.sk/2022/scitanie/en.html
> 'There appears to be general consensus that building with Claude is a lot of fun, which I fully agree with. Unfortunately this is resulting in a lot of stuff getting built that isn't useful. In many ways the old adage is more relevant than ever: "Figuring out what to build is more important than how to build it."'
In my case, the current sweet spot is projects with an audience of one. I've used Claude Code to make a couple of little apps that are genuinely very useful to me, and to modify another with quick fixes for a couple of issues that were bothering me. They may not pass any kind of code review, they probably still have some bugs I haven't found yet, and I certainly wouldn't try to pass them off as robust, saleable products. But they work well enough for my low-stakes use cases. and it's very unlikely I would have got around to them without AI assistance.
> In my case, the current sweet spot is projects with an audience of one.
Yeah. I have a few generated Python scripts, such as "give me a quick summary of this file" for a few specific file types that I work with.
(I could also ask the AI to give me the summary, but sometimes the data is confidential, and running a deterministic script means no hallucinations. That is, the script itself could be wrong, but the it would be wrong deterministically, which I would probably quickly find out.)
Generally, "don't do this, make me a Python script that does this" is a useful approach to some kinds of problems.
"He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines." - 1984
It's the single-most horrifying passage I've ever read and Scott Alexander is issuing grants and just casually signal-boosting a contest to hasten its arrival.
If you (or anyone reading really) actually write/create in any other way, I'd be interested to hear your opinion on the HALmarks thing I've just posted about upthread. It's an effort to make a very meagre reaction against the world this kind of shit is building for us.
I love it, and would love to see it adopted.
The ruling that AI is not copyrightable is a good start, but it's definitely not enough.
Jesus Christ don’t even bother with most of these people replying to you. These tech-company adjacents are all so unbelievably out-of-touch with genuine human experience/sentiment - painfully nitpicky and pedantic to boot
This comment is unkind, untrue, and unnecessary.
Unkind, perhaps, but I'll sign on that there are a few commenters that don't appear to be in touch with genuine human experience and are painfully pedantic, and whether offering solidarity is "unnecessary" is something we can quibble over.
Admittedly, considering that the ACX reader survey had more than one professional category related to AI but not even one professional category for the largest employment sector, many here were not going to want to hear my complaining about their Precious.
> […] so unbelievably out-of-touch with genuine human experience/sentiment […]
There are truly soul-crushingly horrible accounts of real human suffering, oppression, and despair. The outlook of a "novel-writing machine" that produces slop for the masses isn't even in the same category.
Some people here are "out-of-touch with genuine human experience", and it certainly aren't those who called out Christina for her description of the cited paragraph as "the single-most horrifying passage" she ever read.
She’s relating a relevant passage she found emotionally salient in the context of the wider novel/her own life. She’s not literally saying it’s more horrifying than mass subjugation/torture.
Good misdirect to avoid considering her stance. Keep being intentionally obtuse and clawing at the moral high ground
This isn't an everybody-talks-about-their-feelings-and-nobody-is-allowed-to-disagree safe space. If someone comes here and claims that a sidenote about machine-written fiction is literally more horrifying than anything else in a book that's all about mass subjugation and torture, and that therefore promoting an AI-writing-contest is ethically indefensible and unforgivable, then they should expect some pushback. And your rambling about "out-of-touch" "tech-company adjacents" and the "technophilic elite" won't detract from that.
Might need to check your sources before making claims like these. I said, and I will emphasize for your benefit:
"It's the single-most horrifying passage ******I've****** ever read..."
... and then tediously defended why *I*, with my personal history and taste, find a subtle, work-it-out-for-yourself passage of masterful world-building to be more horrifying than a straightforward torture scene not meaningfully different from the thousands of straightforward torture scenes I've experienced across movies and books.
> "claims that a sidenote about machine-written fiction is literally more horrifying than anything else in a book that's all about mass subjugation and torture, and that ******therefore****** promoting an AI-writing-contest is ethically indefensible and unforgivable"
(emphasis mine)
Perhaps delete the word "therefore" from your vocabulary for a while? You're not using it correctly!
If you don't want to be disagreed with by a disproportionately nerdy crowd, why would you comment here? I'm not joking or taking a swipe at the 'nerds'; the main selling point of this comment section, IMO, is that you'll get relatively open, relatively diverse discussion from people who are more likely to say 'I disagree with you because [a few hundred words of earnest explanation]" than "Jesus Christ [a couple sentences of low-effort snark]".
I don’t care that they’re nerdy. I care that they’re adjacent to an insular technophilic elite, and consequently so narrowed they can’t understand - or more importantly feel - why dehumanising our most human endeavours is bad.
Treating AI encroachment like a harmless curiosity
> "dehumanising our most human endeavours is bad."
I wish I'd thought to reply to every comment with a straightforward statement like this.
Frankly, I don't understand.
The horrifying part of the quote isn't "machine-generated", the horrifying part is centrally controlled generation of vacuous boilerplate cookie-cutter storytelling designed to sedate the masses. And - we're already there, we've been there before AI. (1984 is no dystopia, it's a satire.) If anything, AI offers an escape route - anyone can now create their own pulp fiction tailored to their own individual preferences. Model makers can only impotently attempt to prevent us from generating shit they disapprove of.
And the people running the contest specifically don't want automated cookie-cutter generation. They want human ingenuity to show that LLMs can be viable creative tools. (They'll probably get disappointed, either by the results, or by other people not being as impressed as they are. Still.)
Having just had a similar conversation on Reddit, I would like to pipe in here as well. I am one of those people who create fiction using AI, and I do not conceal the fact that I do so.
To me, the advent of AI was a miracle. For many years, I sat on stories that I have wanted to see told, because I lacked the talent to bring them to life well enough for them to have a reason to exist. AI changed everything. AI has helped me deepen characters and recommended plot devices that I would not have thought of on my own. AI has helped me structure stories to make them much more readable and even sometimes powerful. AI has often given me words that fit the stories better than many of my own.
To address the obvious objection, I don't simply point the machine in a direction and have it do its best. Forst, I develop the story concepts, and I do that on my own. I then use AI to brainstorm plotlines and characters in an iterative process. When I get to an outline I like, I use the machine to build blocks of text, which I interleave with my own words. Finally, I minutely edit the results until I get a text I can actually live with.
I know that there are many who would call this cheating and the output of such a process slop. I cannot agree. I believe that the results are actually quite good. The roughly 500 people who have read my work so far generally agree, and I regularly get fan mail.
To illustrate what I am saying, someone close to me had been objecting to my method, not wanting to read words made by a machine. But after reading just one story, I no longer heard that. Instead, I heard about how well the story worked and how compelling the characters were. In fact, in my somewhat biased view, what comes out of my process is a damn sight better than a great deal of published work from years past.
If anyone is curious, I post all my work on Substack under this handle. My use of AI is detailed in my fiction profile.
I appreciate you posting this. I also do creative work with AI with very similar workflow as you and it comes out really good! However, I fully think it is because of the Human input that makes it good enough.
I've been faced with a lot of biased and judgement from some people that assume I'm just creating slop and that the AI is doing the writing and I'm doing almost nothing and frankly it sucks! I put a lot of thought and work into what I'm creating with the help of these tools.
I also really really dislike "slop" but its become apparent that this bias isn't being applied judiciously.
Pioneers always get the arrows, so I am not too out out by the negativity. I suspect that before too long, this will be the default way of making art.
love that imagery and it certainly poignant.
The haters here really don't bother me; really just symptoms of broader trends.
Its when people that I'm connected to IRL that dismiss and don't even give the time of day that I have to cope with a little bit lol. Not too much though! I've grown used to being the "different" one almost anywhere I am.
Yeah, it’s the same offline as on. It will take a breakthrough by one author, I think, for the world to begin to accept it.
Slowly and then all at once lol
Do you read other fiction that's produced by AI, either completely or similar to the process you've described? If so, what's the best AI story or novel you've read that's not your own?
To be honest, I haven’t read any so far
Even just for developing concepts, whatever you get from AI doesn't come from your own thoughts and experiences. If you collaborated with real people, every part of the story would at least have a specific meaning to somebody, even if it wasn't all from you. But with AI, it's all just coming from pattern matching and so it has the sense of something deeper, but it's fabricated.
For mindless entertainment this is fine, but for anything important it just becomes corrupted.
I would consider this criticism more seriously if you have read my work. Without having done so, this is just theoretical.
It's based off of other AI-assisted content I've consumed, or even toyed with myself. I am interested in reading something of yours to see what I think, though. Do you have anything on the shorter side that you're fond of?
Make that 2000 words.
I'll check it out soon!
My shortest story is The Pillars of Creation, which is about 4000 words, as I recall off-hand.
I'm pretty sure fiction produced in the way you describe would not be a vaild target for the competition Scott is promoting.
The rules as written expect you to prompt once and submit the resulting output with no editing, alongside assorted technical context which proves that this is what you have done.
That is a very very different beast from the process you describe. I have much less problem with someone who has something large, complex and specific they want to get out of their head into the world using whatever tools it takes to do that than I do with people who have nothing in particular to say and just want to get rich quick.
You are absolutely right. For the competition I am planning to submit a new piece written according to the rules. I will apply my learnings so far and do my best to produce something interesting. We’ll see what happens.
What would you consider the best work you've published?
I would say that my best so far is the novel I am serializing now, called The Field of Blood. It's a departure for me. The stories I began with were in the speculative genre. This is an historical novel, or at least a novel set in history.
I am pretty proud of some of my speculative work as well, not least the novella "Inversion" and the short "In the Garden of Eden, Baby". The latter actually won a magazine award.