07mk
1d ago
Assuming information is more incorrect because it comes from someone with information, training, and experience is obvious idiocy, but it does appear to be the stance you are advocating for.
This is false, it's obviously false by looking at this thread, and I'm puzzled as to how you can write this as if it would be taken seriously. Like, it's so transparently dishonest that I don't know what else to say than that you appear to be obviously operating in bad faith, and I would prefer you didn't.
07mk
1d ago
The analogy holds.
OK, well I see no prospect of any productive conversation with you on this topic, then. I'll only respond to your comments insomuch as to correct what I see as errors for third parties.
07mk
1d ago
If you reframe this discussion as "I, a person who is not an aerospace engineer, is disagreeing with the findings of aerospace engineers who have no financial incentive and the inventor of the airplane, who happens to be hired by the defense" that is an accurate enough presentation.
This is a terrible analogy, and I think you're smart enough to know it. Let's use an analogy that's more akin to psychology:
If you reframe this discussion as "I, a person who is not a homeopathy researcher, is disagreeing with the findings of homeopathy researchers who have no financial incentive and the inventor of homeopathic therapies, who happens to be hired by the defense (presumably regarding some dispute about homeopathic therapy)" that is an accurate enough presentation.
The difference between aerospace engineering and homeopathy/psychology is that the former has loads of empirical evidence and concrete track record of success as detectable and measurable by a layman in everyday life, while the latter 2 not only lack empirical evidence but often go directly against it.
If you want to claim that modern psychology as practiced by modern psychologists has as much credibility as modern aerospace engineering as practiced by modern aerospace engineers, then just say that. That can be an interesting venue of conversation, where people can discuss the various details and specifics of what gives these people credibility or doesn't. But just making some vague statement about "expert opinions" and "assuming" they're wrong (again, no such thing happened) looks like you're just trying to smuggle in a bailey via a motte.
07mk
1d ago
This was the exact question people asked when Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots (which is probably one of the most valuable NFL franchises, if not the top one) was arrested for soliciting at a massage parlor. I still haven't gotten a good answer to this, other than that the shame around being a John likely do crazy things to people's psychology, causing, in this case, him to become stupid. Shame around sex work seems to do this in general, I think, based on what I've heard/seen about how porn actresses, Onlyfans models, prostitutes handle their work.
07mk
1d ago
OK, so maybe everyone's judgment about this trial here is bad, exactly as bad as Clancy's supporters. I don't see anywhere in what I wrote that would conflict with that at all. This doesn't change the fact that it's entirely reasonable to conclude that "expert opinions" in this case is no more valuable than one's own judgment. Whatever lack of discernment that anyone here (or anywhere) has, given the current state of psychology and experts thereof, it'd be entirely reasonable to conclude that those experts' opinions are corrupted or biased or incomplete or just plain wrong to a similar extent, i.e. like any non-expert layman's.
07mk
1d ago
Solutions from progressives include throwing money or government workers at them.
If current social workers are ineffective, then they either need better training, more manpower, or more competent people who would be attracted by improved working conditions and wages.
This, to me, seems to be the proper tactic too. However, it's hard not to notice that "throwing money or government workers at them," as proposed by "progressives," doesn't look anything like this, but rather, involves just doing what we were doing already, but MORE. At a minimum, to get better training for social workers would require something like starting psychology, sociology, criminology, over from scratch or close to it, scrapping most current methods, due to being non-credible due to the process by which they were developed (i.e. non-scientifically). This would have to be, likely, a multi-decade project that really should've started 10 years ago, but now would be the 2nd best time to start, and the longer that gets delayed, the more innocent mothers and other people in need of these government services will suffer.
07mk
1d ago
Assuming experts are wrong without any investigation is even worse mental hygiene than assuming they are right without any investigation, and is a massively common intellectual failure in certain communities including our own.
That's not what's happening here, though. People are noticing that expert opinions disagree with their own judgment and deciding that the fact that the opinions come from "experts" doesn't override their judgment, because they value the "expert" opinion no more than that of a layman. It's not assuming that they're wrong, it's using the conclusion that they lack expertise in what they claim to be experts, which might be correct or incorrect, but certainly eminently reasonable when it comes to anything around psychology in 2026.
To claim that "expert opinion" should sway your opinion either way is assuming that they are (more) right (than a layman) without any investigation. To not let it sway your opinion and simply disagree when their opinion disagrees with yours isn't assuming they are wrong, no more than it's assuming any layman is wrong if you don't let a layman's opinion on something convince you.
07mk
1d ago
Well, a lot of things that actually insane people would say also sound like something a murderer would say in order to sound insane, for obvious reasons. It's one of those Very Hard Problems without a solution.
07mk
1d ago
Broadly, if you want to differentiate those types of nerds, it seems like one is more about nerding out about physical reality, while the other is more about nerding out about social reality. Obviously we all have to live in both, but the "computer" nerds really do believe that humans and human society is like a really really complicated computer, one that we can test and check empirically with scientific methods in order to learn more about in order to navigate it better, while the "theater" nerds really do believe that physical reality is like a really really advanced theater, one where we can learn more about the script, the director's demands, the audience's proclivities, in order to navigate it better.
Clearly, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches when it comes to navigating the world better, though usually one is better than the other in specific domains, by my estimation. Why such a dichotomy exists in the nerd population, I'm not sure, maybe it's just an artifact of a general distribution of different types of personalities, which end up grouping together due to some sort of social stickiness.
Why it seems existential might be that both sets of nerds believe that the baseline of the other is just a construct of their own baseline, i.e. social reality is just physics that's really advanced vs. physical reality as humans perceive them are actually just social constructions. It's hard for these things not to conflict with each other.
07mk
1d ago
It feels pretty mean-spirited to describe tech billionares as simply "nerds". Maybe they started off as humble computer nerds, but that was a long time ago and they've done a lot of other stuff since then.Now they have a lot more in common with the richest CEOs of non-tech companies than they do with the rank-and-file engineers.
This is just the apex fallacy, and it has been standard operating procedure for any social analysis of population groups considered low status by the SocJus-inclined for at least a couple decades, I'd guess longer. I recall noticing it first in the early-10s, when people were yelling at nerds for claiming to have had difficulties in life due to their nerdiness, which couldn't possibly be the case since Zuckerberg is a billionaire. There's also the all-consuming gender war where feminists, to this day, often claim that the sexual revolution was a pro-patriarchy psy-op because it gives them easy access to women whenever they want, while women have to put out in order to compete for the men, because men below a certain level of attractiveness just don't register to them as counting. This extends to the trans phenomenon too, where girls transition to becoming trans men, under the belief that they'd get to enjoy life like a high status man (a high profile case right now is Elliot Page, who is openly complaining about not getting Hollywood roles, after transitioning from a very high status woman to a trans man).
07mk
2d ago
This doesn't capture what I'm talking about. Classical mechanics is a very good approximation for relativity when dealing with mass and accelerations that humans generally tend to deal with in everyday life, which is why it was - and still largely is - considered "correct" despite necessarily being inaccurate to the real world. This is very much not the case for the actual IRL examples, where actually studying the underlying science reveals that the things that people are saying don't require mere refinements to get at the truth, but rather have basically no relation. It'd be akin to the discovery that, actually, it's impossible to store or release energy in molecular bonds like in oil. Imagine that were proven beyond any doubt to you, and yet all the world still functions and runs the way that you've perceived it all your life. That'd be utterly mind blowing.
07mk
3d ago
even though the definition of "obvious" depends on the audience and is famously a little slippery.
My favorite variation of this has the professor saying, "It's obvious, but it's not obvious that it's obvious."
07mk
3d ago
Pre scientific people were intentionally mislead by smarter ones too: mystics, false religions, etc.
The difference in my view is that mystics, false religions, etc. didn't provide some structured, well-established method at arriving at facts and the truth the same way science does. Generally, mystics, to whatever extent they believe that their mysticism gives them access to the truth, doesn't purposefully corrupt their mysticism in an effort to "discover" that what is true is everything they wanted to be true all along (arguably the mysticism itself accomplishes that, which is one part of what makes it different from science). Right now, the people purporting to do science are doing exactly that, despite having all the tools and knowledge and information required to understand that they are indeed corrupting science and also how not to corrupt science. That's what makes their stupidity extra stupid.
Like how someone with training in arithmetic and calculators who declares the calculator as a tool of White Supremacy and therefore 12 x 12 = 1212, not 144 like what the calculator said, has a sort of stupidity that goes beyond the stupidity of someone who just never had access to mathematical education and declares 12 x 12 = 1221. 1212 is slightly more accurate because it's even like 144, not odd, and also closer to 144 than 1221 is, but the process by which the person arrived at that was arguably more stupid.
07mk
4d ago
As flawed as academia is, I still think we'd be stupider without it.
I think you're right. But:
- That's what anyone living in the Stupid Ages would think.
- We may be crossing - or already have crossed without knowing - a boundary where academia contributes greater stupidity than it alleviates, and so past performance isn't indicative of future performance.
- Stupidity isn't some single-dimension attribute that we can place on "humanity" and move up or down, but rather an aggregation of countless little individual things, so we could be less stupid thanks to academia and more stupid, with the possibility that the harms of the latter are so significant (though not necessarily greater than the benefits) as to mark our current time.
07mk
4d ago
I'm sure there's stupidity to be found there, but when the real world REQUIRES you get things right in order to actually succeed, the accountability is to some extent baked into the cake, even if various institutions will try to put a few layers of obsfuscation between themselves and the outcomes.
That's exactly why if all that turned out to be a facade, it would be absolutely wild and crazy and turn my world upside down. I'd guess that the odds are low, but also, I'm quite sure that the true believers in those already-discredited fields would also judge the odds as being low for whatever field they're a true believer to.
No matter how stupid people are today, I'm sure they were dumber pre-1900, especially before we normalized hand-washing. Although if you want to call the entire history of humanity "the Stupid ages" I'd agree to that.
I think it could make sense to call the ages the Stupid Ages if the cause of us being stupid was the very thing that was for the purpose of addressing/avoiding/escaping stupidity, which is sort of what's happening with academia, which are ostensibly for the purpose of something like addressing stupidity, even if, overall, we're less stupid than any other age. There's something to hubris that is extra stupid than just being plain old stupid. Especially since hubris is, itself, a concept that is taught in academia as something bad and to avoid.
07mk
4d ago
If it's a facade, it's one that is at least very functional and works reliably day in and day out. Sociology isn't demonstrating it's functional correctness billions of times per second on each of billions of devices.
Right, and imagine just how you'd react if it were proven to you that this was indeed all a facade? My model of the world doesn't have much room for something like that, where something that works literally quadrillions of times a day in basically exactly the way that all the scientists and engineers and experts and my own limited expertise say they do, and yet all of those are complete lies. This would be a revelation that comes close to - not quite, but close - to waking up in a pod and discovering that you had been in The Matrix.
Significantly, I'd wager that the belief by the typical non-stupid layman believer in those already-proven-to-be-stupid fields like sociology, [x] studies, psychology, etc. is about as strong and about as confident as mine is to electrical engineering. It's both reinforced by and causal to the constant defense such people run against scrutinizing such things with basic scientific/academic concepts like "evidence" and "logic." And if those people can be fooled into such stupid beliefs about sociology, then I could be fooled into an equally stupid belief about electrical engineering.
07mk
4d ago
I think LLMs making people stupider doesn't have much relation to LLMs' ability detect past stupidity that had been sufficiently hidden via exploiting human biases. As long as it doesn't uniformly make all the smartest people stupid (possible, but I think LLMs likely have an effect that's bifurcated on smart/stupid people in terms of their intelligence, if at all), some smart people will exist who can direct the LLMs towards detecting and revealing that stupidity.
I suppose the depressing possibility (likelihood?) is that the populace will be so stupid due to LLMs that all the revealing-of-stupidity just makes the smart people feel like they have no mouth and they must scream. Probably a better apocalypse than the AM takeover? In any case, to avert the apocalypse, perhaps the thing to do is to accelerate the revealing of stupidity and discrediting of these institutions even more, faster than LLMs can make everyone stupid (though we may already be too late on that, even in the pre-LLM times).
07mk
4d ago
I'm starting to think that Futurama was rather prescient in calling the turn of the century from 20th to 21st as the Stupid Ages. More and more of the facade of credibility of organizations, institutions, people, ideas, etc. that people used to believe were not stupid - justifying using them to guide their decisions to be less stupid - have revealed themselves to be deeply stupid. I hope that LLMs will become so cheap and reliable that all the previously hidden stupidity will be aired out for all to see soon enough. I just dread what unexpected stupidity will be found - sociology, [x] studies, psychology are the obvious no-brainer candidates which have already largely gone through the process, but what if it turns out even very "hard" or concrete fields like electrical engineering or chemistry are built on a bunch of stupidity that has just enough facade to be convincing to the in-field expert and certainly more than enough to the layman?
07mk
4d ago
On the other hand, it seems equally intuitive to think that middle-management is not so concerned with appearances, instead prioritizing the bottom line.
This doesn't seem intuitive at all. From what I've observed, middle managers aren't especially known for prioritizing the bottom line - even upper managers and CEOs aren't known for that, though they're generally moreso. They're known for prioritizing their own career progression, which is sometimes helped by the bottom line, but, for middle managers, often are overwhelmed by other, often zero-sum/negative-sum concerns like office politics, which often intersects with actual politics.
07mk
4d ago
I just want to say, from what I can tell, HereAndGone2's description:
The guys at the top, if they're smart, certainly can't believe in supernatural nonsense. So they know the truth, but they cynically power grab by manipulating the gullible masses in their ignorance. To get a top job in the hierarchy, you can't really believe the supernatural crap, so selection for smart cynics ensures the leadership is always majority, if not completely, 'we know it's bullshit but it enables us to rule over the dumb peasantry so we pretend, too'.
is basically the standard model of how the typical atheist progressive liberal believes all major religions work. Hence the talk about US imperialism and oppression and such to explain the motive behind Islamic terrorism against various Western targets, always foregoing any sort of religious/faith-based explanation except for the useful idiots who are manipulated by their ostensibly-Muslim-but-actually-atheist leaders into actually blowing themselves up. This is also related to the common notion among them that "We've already had an atheist president, but we just don't know which one," or even the during-2008 "common knowledge" belief by Democrats that Barack Obama was a lying liar who lied about his opposition to gay marriage so that he could cynically manipulate the country into legalizing gay marriage once he gained power.
07mk
4d ago
Plenty of noob directors have been fumbling existing franchises with no problem recently, despite the risk of backlash. It beggars belief that nobody wanted to take a chance.
I think the idea that "these nerdy loser franchises for nerdy losers that somehow still broke out to mainstream success ought to be taken over and transformed to appeal to cool people like me" just wasn't as common or popular in the 90s or even 00s compared to the 2010s-20s.
07mk
4d ago
I’m skeptical of the proposition that Anthropic employees are our moral and intellectual superiors, but clearly it cannot be discarded outright.
Intellectual, there's probably a strong case to be made. Moral, it cannot be discarded outright, but also any moral/ethical question that acts as a filter for becoming an Anthropic employee seems unlikely to provide any information for determining this, since the morals that people say they will follow is almost always entirely reflective of what they believe a morally good person would follow, which only coincidentally sometimes intersects with what they themselves would follow. That's before accounting for bad faith liars.
If she actually is mentally ill, then consenting to treatment is taking responsibility.
Given that there's currently a trial where other people are choosing whether or not to direct this towards her without her consent, it seems evident that she isn't taking responsibility, and lots of people are supporting her avoiding responsibility on the basis that she is suffering from things that are consequences of her being a mother.
In any case, "taking responsibility" for one's actions and being held accountable are different, though related, concepts.
EDIT:
Actually, I realized that this was just a non sequitur. Her being mentally ill isn't the issue here, it's whether or not she's an example of how many women are claiming that hormones make them "mentally ill" to the extent that they ought not be held accountable for their actions, in the sense that when they "take responsibility," it's through "consenting to treatment" rather than "prison, like any non-mentally-ill person would do."
So the above paragraphs that I wrote aren't all that relevant, actually. The whole point here is that we understand that "consenting to treatment" isn't actually meaningfully held accountable to anyone except the mentally ill; to claim that her hormones just made her that mentally ill as to be placed in that lower tier of being "held accountable" is also to claim that vast swathes of women in general ought to be suspected of being so "mentally ill," which puts into question their equal rights.
Indeed. And I've noticed that
Well, not literally at the exact same identical level, but close enough, as I was being hyperbolic; I'm assuming your comparison of aerospace engineering with psychiatry was also hyperbolic, because that claim would be more ridiculous than homeopathy, as someone with more knowledge than I wish I had in psychiatry.
I've noticed that through my various investigations of reality, that this is true. There's no single text or set of texts I could read on some semi-anonymous message board that would convince me otherwise. If your judgment is that my judgment is wrong, that's fair enough, different people come to different conclusions based on the evidence. But nowhere did I imply that "information is more incorrect because it comes from someone with information, training, and experience." That is utterly ridiculous and transparently in bad faith. The point is that psychiatry experts, and people who trust them, like you, believe they have information, training, and experience [in ways that would inform them better than the layman], when, in fact, that is false. Much like how a homeopathic researcher believes, in their heart of hearts, that they have better information, training, and experience in healing people with water, or a moon landing truther believes that they have better information, etc. Again, different people can have different opinions on this, but given the state of the evidence, it is quite reasonable to group all these people together in terms of their credibility.
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