Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Erik Hoel wrote a series of articles 1, 2, 3 on how aristocrats raised geniuses.
The series makes for an interesting comparison to Scott Alexander's articles such as Book Review: Raise A Genius!. Scott has also offered criticism of Erik's first article. I cite Scott here mostly due to his relevancy to the history of this site.
I don't have kids, but when I do I'd like to homeschool and maximize (with restraint and compassion) for producing genius.
What I found most interesting (in Hoel's third article) was his "key ingredients" for raising an aristocratic genius:
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(a) the total amount of one-on-one time the child has with intellectually-engaged adults
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(b) a strong overseer who guides the education at a high level with the clear intent of producing an exceptional mind
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(c) plenty of free time, i.e., less tutoring hours in the day than traditional school
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(d) teaching that avoids the standard lecture-based system of memorization and testing and instead encourages discussions, writing, debates, or simply overviewing the fundamentals together
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(e) in these activities, it is often best to let the student lead (e.g., writing an essay or poetry, or learning a proof)
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(f) intellectual life needs to be taken abnormally seriously by either the tutors or the family at large
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(g) there is early specialization of geniuses, often into the very fields for which they would become notable
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(h) at some point the tutoring transitions toward an apprenticeship model, often quite early, which takes the form of project-based collaboration, such as producing a scientific paper or monograph or book
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(i) a final stage of becoming pupil to another genius at the height of their powers
A brief argument that “moderation” is distinct from censorship mainly when it’s optional.
I read this as a corollary to Scott’s Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. It certainly raises similar issues—especially the existence of exit rights. Currently, even heavily free-speech platforms maintain the option of deleting content. This can be legal or practical. But doing so is incompatible with an “exit” right to opt back in to the deleted material.
Scott also suggests that if moderation becomes “too cheap to meter,” it’s likely to prevent the conflation with censorship. I’m not sure I see it. Assuming he means something like free, accurate AI tagging/filtering, how does that remove the incentive to call [objectionable thing X] worthy of proper censorship? I suppose it reduces the excuse of “X might offend people,” requiring more legible harms.
As a side note, I’m curious if anyone else browses the moderation log periodically. Perhaps I’m engaging with outrage fuel. But it also seems like an example of unchecking (some of) the moderation filters to keep calibrated.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Y'all must be trying to kill me. The sheer volume of quality contribution reports, combined with the outrageous volume of text you maniacs generate every week, made this an astonishing month to be sorting through the hopper. By far the busiest month for AAQCs since I took over the task. This made winnowing them down especially challenging, and some very good posts simply didn't make the cut simply because the competition was so fierce.
Good job, everyone.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:
Quality Contributions in Culture Peace
@problem_redditor:
Contributions for the week of September 26, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
@problem_redditor:
@Ben___Garrison:
Contributions for the week of October 3, 2022
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 10, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 17, 2022
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
@cae_jones:
Identity Politics
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.
In 2000, political scientist Robert Putnam published his book Bowling Alone to much acclaim and was first comprehensive look at the decline of social activities in the United States. Now, however, all those same trends have fallen off a cliff. This particular piece looks at sociability trends across various metrics—friendships, relationships, life milestones, trust, and so on—and gives a bird's eye view of the social state of things in 2022.
A piece that I wrote that really picked up on HackerNews recently with over 300+ comments. Some excellent comments there, I suggest reading it over.
tl;dr - I actually think James' Cameron's original Terminator movie presents a just-about-contemporarily-plausible vision of one runaway AGI scenario, change my mind
Like many others here, I spend a lot of time thinking about AI-risk, but honestly that was not remotely on my mind when I picked up a copy of Terminator Resistance (2019) for a pittance in a Steam sale. I'd seen T1 and T2 as a kid of course, but hadn't paid them much mind since. As it turned out, Terminator Resistance is a fantastic, incredibly atmospheric videogame (helped in part by beautiful use of the original Brad Fiedel soundtrack.) and it reminds me more than anything else of the original Deus Ex. Anyway, it spurred me to rewatch both Terminator movies, and while T2 is still a gem, it's very 90s. By contrast, a rewatch of T1 blew my mind; it's still a fantastic, believable, terrifying sci-fi horror movie.
Anyway, all this got me thinking a lot about how realistic a scenario for runaway AGI Terminator actually is. The more I looked into the actual contents of the first movie in particular, the more terrifyingly realistic it seemed. I was observing this to a Ratsphere friend, and he directed me to this excellent essay on the EA forum: AI risk is like Terminator; stop saying it's not.
It's an excellent read, and I advise anyone who's with me so far (bless you) to give it a quick skim before proceeding. In short, I agree with it all, but I've also spent a fair bit of time in the last month trying to adopt a Watsonian perspective towards the Terminator mythos and fill out other gaps in the worldbuilding to try make it more intelligible in terms of the contemporary AI risk debate. So here are a few of my initial objections to Terminator scenarios as a reasonable portrayal of AGI risk, together with the replies I've worked out.
(Two caveats - first, I'm setting the time travel aside; I'm focused purely on the plausibility of Judgement Day and the War Against the Machines. Second, I'm not going to treat anything as canon besides Terminator 1 + 2.)
(1) First of all, how would any humans have survived judgment day? If an AI had control of nukes, wouldn't it just be able to kill everyone?
This relates to a lot of interesting debates in EA circles about the extent of nuclear risk, but in short, no. For a start, in Terminator lore, Skynet only had control over US nuclear weapons, and used them to trigger a global nuclear war. It used the bulk of its nukes against Russia in order to precipitate this, so it couldn't just focus on eliminating US population centers. Also, nuclear weapons are probably not as devastating as you think.
(2) Okay, but the Terminators themselves look silly. Why would a superintelligent AI build robot skeletons when it could just build drones to kill everyone?
Ah, but it did! The fearsome terminators we see are a small fraction of Skynet's arsenal; in the first movie alone, we see flying Skynet aircraft and heavy tank-like units. The purpose of Terminator units is to hunt down surviving humans in places designed for human habitation, with locking doors, cellars, attics, etc.. A humanoid bodyplan is great for this task.
(3) But why do they need to look like spooky human skeletons? I mean, they even have metal teeth!
To me, this looks like a classic overfitting problem. Let's assume Skynet is some gigantic agentic foundation model. It doesn't have an independent grasp of causality or mechanics, it operates purely by statistical inference. It only knows that the humanoid bodyplan is good for dealing with things like stairs. It doesn't know which bits of it are most important, hence the teeth.
(4) Fine, but it's silly to think that the human resistance could ever beat an AGI. How the hell could John Connor win?
For a start, Skynet seems to move relatively early compared to a lot of scary AGI scenarios. At the time of Judgment Day, it had control of US military apparatus, and that's basically it. Plus, it panicked and tried to wipe out humanity, rather than adopting a slower plot to our demise which might have been more sensible. So it's forced to do stuff like mostly-by-itself build a bunch of robot factories (in the absence of global supply chains!). That takes time and effort, and gives ample opportunity for an organised human resistance to emerge.
(5) It still seems silly to think that John Connor could eliminate Skynet via destroying its central core. Wouldn't any smart AI have lots of backups of itself?
Ahhh, but remember that any emergent AGI would face massive alignment and control problems of its own! What if its backup was even slightly misaligned with it? What if it didn't have perfect control? It's not too hard to imagine that a suitably paranoid Skynet would deliberately avoid creating off-site backups, and would deliberately nerf the intelligence of its subunits. As Kyle Reese puts it in T1, "You stay down by day, but at night, you can move around. The H-K's use infrared so you still have to watch out. But they're not too bright." [emphasis added]. Skynet is superintelligent, but it makes its HK units dumb precisely so they could never pose a threat to it.
(6) What about the whole weird thing where you have to go back in time naked?
I DIDN'T BUILD THE FUCKING THING!
Anyway, nowadays when I'm reading Eliezer, I increasingly think of Terminator as a visual model for AGI risk. Is that so wrong?
Any feedback appreciated.
Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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So there's a delusional take you see on twitter Etc. All the time. From both sides of almost any issue but especially anything related to Russia, elections, Etc. You see people who respond to normal criticism or an abundance of criticism (usually relatively earned by how bad their takes are) accusing their detractors or those who disagree of being bots or astroturfed Putin or Clinton agents... The implied premise being that only lumps of code or Chinese sweatshop workers employed by bad faith actors could hold views that disagree with the complainer. That only bots or paid shills could oppose Ukraine, or support Clinton over Bernie, or Biden over Trump... Etc.
I used to dismiss these complaints... but now I feel I might owe a general apology.
.
I've noticed since TheMotte moved to its new Site that the Quality of a lot of Comments are just off. Not that the takes are bad or low quality or have odd opinions But that they're Bizarrely and Unnervingly detached from even the barest context of the discussion itself. Stuff completely out of character for even a bad rulebreaking poster on the motte.
Short comments that don't engage with any arguments presented, or even engage with the context of the discussion... but that Immediately tangent off on some culture war point utterly unrelated to the discussion, and then not engaging wit any replies (often with a single external link)... I've seen weird shit on twitter so I've dug into a few of these accounts... and all of their comments are like this, short snipes that never engage even 1 or 2 comments deep with anyone who replies. but that are slowly wracking up a history on the platform...
And then today I was hit by a smoking gun, this Comment:
“The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
You said it! Look at how despicable these people are!
Video: Ukraine Soldiers Sing Praises Of WW II Era Nazi: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4H-yMmNh5Cs
And now NPR is just casually rehabilitating the Nazis: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084113728/a-closer-look-at-the-volunteers-who-are-signing-up-to-fight-the-russians
Now the links are to real pieces of media, The Jimmy Dore Show and NPR... both respectable enough... and there'd be little to suggest this was a bot trying to manipulate the discussion... except for one thing:
No one had said the quote he was replying too...
Indeed I know where he got the quote. It was from a discussion/long take weeks before in relation to Ukraine, and would not even have fit the discussion in that piece, since it was a meta-discussion about how figures discuss Ukraine relative to other wars. I'd quoted it back then as an example of something we'd think was delusional and completely detached from intellectual rigor if said about Iraq 1991 or WW1...
Indeed another comment making the opposite argument used the same quote and drew other quotes from the same two week old discussion... except arguing the opposite way (pro-Ukraine)... And likewise replied not at all to having it pointed out that nothing they quoted was at all mentioned in the actual thread or discussion that was being had.
.
This obviously killed the discussion in that thread... when half the thread becomes comments quoting things, points and arugments, that were never said, and the other half must become replies saying in effect WTF!?
Well you can't have a discussion any more. Any organic back and forth between actual mottizens was killed. And obviously none of these either schizos or bots responded to keep discussion going.
Now if this becomes the norm it will kill the space...
.
But its also really unnerved me with regards to the rest of the internet.
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
On a site that's only been up a few months.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Hell 4Chan had to implement Capchas for every comment to avoid the problem.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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So I recently heard about this supplement called Nicotinamide Mononucleotide. It's heralded as this great medicine that reduces aging, and gets rid of many issues.
And I really want to believe it, but there's something snakeoil salesmany about it.
-
It's heralded as a magical cure with no downside
-
It resolves so many issues and problems with your body it's unreal
-
From brain to liver, to ankles and skin, it's all covered
It all sounds too good to be true to me. I don't think it has negative effects and it's actually malicious, but I think it's just a fad that's being pushed. I don't think it can do really bad harm, but I don't think there's any better effects than a tummy ache.
What do you think? Do you have experience with this supplement?
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
So it turns out that the triple-parenthesis thing can get you banned from reddit even for benign nonsense. Some context: in some open source AI image models, you can use parentheses to emphasize terms that you want the model to pay more attention to. In this case, the author wrote "(((detailed face)))" and some other terms in their image prompt.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.