07mk
3d ago
The latest stats on smoking I saw said something on the order of 1/8 chance of getting lung cancer if you smoke a pack a day. Of course, there are many other ways that smoking can kill you, including other cancers and heart disease, but I don't think all of those amount to significantly more than lung cancer, to the extent that the odds are better than not that, if you smoke a pack a day, smoking won't be the thing to kill you. As such, I don't think it's correct to call it a slow form of suicide.
07mk
3d ago
By your reasoning, there's no need to change any details; she could have made it exactly describe the guy and as long as she said it was fiction, it would be the fault of the people reading.
You're right, it should be more nuanced, and this does break down at the edges and extremes. If I wrote a short story about someone named "Jiro" who posts on a forum called "TheMotte" and characterized him as a big stupid doo-doo-head and published somewhere that would have a lot of TheMotte users (or we were in an alternative universe where TheMotte was fairly mainstream - but then that TheMotte wouldn't be recognizably TheMotte anymore, would it?), I couldn't credibly claim that this was a completely fictional story that shouldn't be taken as a malicious smear on you. At some point, the deniability is implausible, and that is beyond that point. Even if I named the character "Gyro" on "TheMoat" website, it wouldn't be plausible.
I don't think the situation here is all that analogous. We note that multiple people who knew the man in question and read the story inferred the story was about him; we don't know how many people who didn't know that specific man and read the story inferred the story was about some other poor sap who had nothing to do with the story. We also don't know how many people knew the man in question and read the story and never connected the two. It's not clear to me that it was predictable, much less completely so, for the author that publishing this story would lead to people believing bad things about the real man.
By your reasoning, I could say that there's a party on your lawn this weekend and if anyone comes and messes up your lawn, I have no responsibility. In fact, I could make a false police report about you committing an actual crime and as long as I've put some details in that the police could theoretically check before arresting you, it's not my fault if you get arrested.
If I were to explicitly and, in good faith, say that I'm lying when I tell others about this fictional party or file this false police report - as this author did when she said the story was fiction and doubled down on that fictional aspect when asked - then I do think the responsibility falls on the person who believes me (of course, lying on a police report is also itself a crime, but a different crime).
Or if you're Jewish I could report you to the Nazis--I've only given them truthful information, it's the Nazis' fault if they then decide to kill you based on it.
This one's an edge case where it's hard for me to imagine how I could lie to the Nazis, in good faith, that the truthful location of some Jew that I'm telling them is actually a lie. When some group is going around saying "we're going around looking for Xs to murder," telling them something like, "Here's a fictional story about an X living 2 blocks away in the red house with the blue door that we pass by every morning in our IRL commute" doesn't carry credibility as being just a fictional story without any basis in reality. The situation here with the story is somewhat analogous to that, but I do think the analogy breaks down due to the much more diffuse and weaker authoritarianism of the progressive/feminist/woke left during that era compared to the Nazis during the era when they were in charge in Germany.
07mk
3d ago
To whatever extent someone's predictable reaction is unjust, I place the blame on the person reacting in the unjustified manner. For instance, it's completely predictable that if you go around college campuses trying to use good faith debate to argue for milquetoast mainstream Christian conservative ideals, that others will react in a way that gives you the reputation as a neo-Nazi male chauvinist who wants to enslave all women and murder brown people. I place no blame on someone who does this for gaining such a reputation, because the actual responsibility lies in those who observe the former and unjustly/incorrectly/maliciously interpret it as an expression of the latter.
In this case, I place the full blame on those who read these scribblings on paper - scribblings that the author explicitly (falsely) said she invented based loosely on someone other than that man - and deciding that these made-up scribblings implied things about that real man. That decision was unjust, incorrect, maybe malicious, and I place the entirety of the blame on those who made that decision. If explicitly presenting the story as fictional and explicitly misdirecting the audience towards a false IRL inspiration is being reckless in terms of libeling the true IRL inspiration with the contents of the story, then I think that just renders the term "reckless" meaningless.
07mk
3d ago
No, the lie is that she made him out to be something damn close to a rapist and stalker when he really wasn't at all.
She did no such thing, though. She invented a fictional character who were those things, basing that fictional character and the fictional scenario largely on someone she met IRL. Any inference about actual reality and real humans living within it based on the text that she put down was something voluntarily done entirely by the reader. Especially since she lied in a way that pointed away from the real person she based the character on.
If it was purely a fictional story it would be fine, but she left in enough real details that all of his real-life friends and family isntantly recognized him and started asking him if the story was about him. She essentially libeled him by calling him a rapist, and got away with "it's just fiction bro" as a legal fig leaf. This probably resultd in a lot of his friends and family turning against him.
That's a big leap from the 1st sentence to the 2nd. I disagree that leaving in that many real details in a story that's explicitly presented as fiction is "essentially libel" with a "fig leaf." I think that's just an entirely normal, reasonable thing for any fiction writer to do, and any harm that might have come the way of the real person that the fictional character was inspired by is entirely the fault of whoever read the fictional story and jumped to conclusions about reality. Certainly, it's possible that this author was playing some 4D chess to libel this innocent man via plausibly deniable means? It's just not in evidence, and all she appears to be certainly guilty of is fictionalize some IRL story she heard in a salacious/provocative way that was particularly in vogue at the time. Perhaps that deserves condemnation for the worst of all crimes, poor taste. But for harming that guy's life or mental health or theoretically turning his friends against him? She deserves no blame, no responsibility.
07mk
4d ago
One of the most normie things in that era associated with that is a letter that the Obama administration sent to publicly funded universities telling them that they should use a "preponderance of evidence" standard (generally described as 50.00001% certainty of guilt) to find students guilty of sexual assault in their internal, non-legally-related justice and discipline system. This, combined with the general notion and meme that "false rape accusations are vanishingly rare as measured by court cases and convictions, therefore any verbally stated accusation of any sexual impropriety ought to be considered true by default until proven otherwise" which was never official policy but was certainly the attitude of most of the feminist left that tended to dominate university administration meant that students were aware that if they weren't 100% sure that they'd receive a positive response, hitting on someone carried a real risk of putting their schooling and sunk tuition costs in the hands of a stranger's whims. And, unsurprisingly, people who went to college tended to be overrepresented among the people with power and loudspeakers.
07mk
4d ago
Presuming that she's being honest in the quoted email, I'm not sure why you find yourself so outraged? Her lying about it in print is bad, but the lie was that it was purely fictional, which is a way of making the real guy appear more distant from the creepy asshole that is depicted in the fiction. Given that, I don't think she deserves any blame for whatever poor mental state that real guy might have gotten into. If this story made him do so, it was due to his choice to interpret the text in a way that was clearly against the stated and ostensible intention. Unfortunate for the guy, but if this author had used an RNG that, through sheer luck, happened to generate that exact same story, resulting in that guy falsely believing that he was being represented as a creepy asshole, the same thing would have happened.
No, screw that. I'm going back to my original gut reaction from when I first read it- this story is biased as hell, it's a feminist hit piece to smear all men, and it's just pure culture-war fodder. She started off with a true story for inspiration, but then deliberately changed all important details for maximum outrage. Sometimes things are just that simple.
Which, yeah. That's all it was, and, as someone who also subscribes to the Death of the Author, I believe that's pretty much all it could ever be. Whether or not the story is an accurate account of true things that actually happened or the fever dream of a feminist with a fetish for being oppressed (perhaps I repeat myself?) doesn't matter, it's the text that is presented that matters, because the text is what gets read and interpreted, not the thoughts or intentions of the author.
07mk
4d ago
If you imagined them, you and I were part of a shared imagination. I don't recall there being mountains of such articles, but there certainly were a bunch.
Within the new atheist movement, there was a major hubbub where a semi-famous figure in the sphere, Rebecca Watson (a founder of Skepchick, IIRC, and also a then-member of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast) wrote some essay complaining about being propositioned at some convention by a male attendee at 2AM in a hotel elevator as being something terrible and probably misogynistic and patriarchal or something.
I don't have any links to primary sources off-hand, because these aren't pleasant things that I wanted to remind myself of.
07mk
4d ago
It will be interesting to see whether those New York City Jews who swore they would leave for Florida if Mamdani got elected will make good on their promised exodus [heh].
I'd love to see God top his Red Sea trick with one all down the US East Coast from Manhattan to Miami. It's over 5x the distance, but it's been a couple thousand years, at least, since He pulled that off for Moses, which is a lot of time for Him to improve (or is that also one of those things that a perfect, omnipotent being can't do?).
07mk
4d ago
Given he's a socialist, it's hard to believe he won't fuck it up. Even if he weren't ineligible I can't see him being a serious contender for President based on what I expect his record to be.
As much as I'm being tongue-in-cheek by taking how hot Mamdani's been the last 3 months and extending it out forward (then he'd be God Emperor of the Democratic People's Republic of Earth within the decade - but no one remains that hot in politics for that long, not even exceptions to exceptions to exceptions like Trump), I think this analysis is flawed.
Almost certainly he will fuck it up - by default because he's a politician, and even moreso because he's a socialist - but a politician's record doesn't matter for his electoral prospects; it's the perception of his record by the voters that matters. And I've been burned too many times underestimating just how far the distance between perception and reality can be, especially in politics, to bet that Mamdani's (predicted) poor record once he becomes NYC mayor will meaningfully affect his chances in future elections for bigger seats, relative to his apparent charisma to half the voters, along with his superior genetics and religion to much of that same half.
My prediction as of a couple weeks ago has been that once Mamdani wins and rules over NYC, to whatever extent he achieves his political promises, they won't effectively address the real thing that the policies are supposed to address, and this failure will entirely be blamed on Republicans and not-sufficiently-socialist-Democrats for not doing what their moral superiors have told them they ought to do, rather than Mamdani and his allies for simply having a poor understanding of how politics and economics work. Whether or not this assignment of blame is "fair" or "correct" for whatever those terms mean in this context, most high status journalism outlets will reinforce the notion that it is "correct" to enough of an extent that it will be the mainstream, default, "educated" opinion that Mamdani didn't fail, he was failed by an Islamophobic, racist, and probably transphobic populace/political machine that stood in his way even after he had used his sheer force of charisma and standing for Basic Human Decency to convince enough voters to elect him.
One major wrinkle (among many, I'm sure) in this prediction is that these high status journalists' credibility has been falling among the electorate and seems likely to continue, and so I could be overcorrecting from underestimating the future distance between perception and reality to overestimating it.
07mk
4d ago
I wasn't really paying attention to the NY election race, but for some of the World Series I was watching the Fox NY stream - and boy oh boy were some of the ads airing totally unhinged.
I only saw bits of some ads online, and "unhinged" was a thought that came to my mind as well, reminiscent of the type of things thrown at Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, which ostensibly helped him get elected in 2/3 of those cases. The past decade or so, I'd been worried that President AOC was going to be the Dems' President Trump, but it looks like Mamdani being that might be more likely. The Republicans might MDS their way into creating enough political will to change the Constitution to allow someone naturalized into US citizenship to become POTUS for the sake of Mamdani.
07mk
5d ago
In that trilemma, I'd place my wager down in the middle bucket, i.e. "trying to elucidate what someone really believes." But my belief doesn't matter a whole lot; it's whether or not Heritage Foundation believes that that is what Carlson was trying to do and whether or not they're reasonable to have that belief. Based on what I've seen of Carlson (likely about as much as the non-fan layman, though I did watch his entire Putin interview) and what I've read about this interview with Fuentes, I believe that the answers to those questions are, respectively: yes and yes.
07mk
8d ago
How that squares with refusing to denounce Carlson is left as an exercise to the student.
The idea that there's something to square here seems patently absurd to me. Especially for a public commentator like Carlson, publicly talking to and spreading the message of people who deserve denouncement is exactly the role he should be filling. So of course people who would denounce someone like Fuentes wouldn't necessarily have a reason to denounce someone like Carlson for publicly speaking with him.
07mk
11d ago
Problem is that a shove isn't really an escalation to deadly force. Just because you end up on the ground you're not really able to say "oh I thought he was going to kill me."
I don't know how the law sees it, but if I'm standing over a hard surface like a sidewalk or even asphalt, I would consider an unprompted shove as escalation to deadly force. A simple fall that results in your head smacking the ground can be fatal and often are, and someone shoving you with intent to disturb you is someone who is clearly fine with a very high probability of you falling over, with high likelihood of you lacking enough control to protect your head during the fall.
07mk
11d ago
Zero Time Dilemma is certainly the weakest of the 3, and it's not close. And I didn't even find most of the scifi/philosophizing to be interesting in 999, especially compared to ZTD. Yet the characters, presentation, and gameplay all were far better in the former (and better still in VLR IMHO), to the extent that I'd say 999 is by far the better game. So I'd say you're not missing out on a whole lot.
07mk
11d ago
When you see Blues/progressives/women in jubilation over the killing of Charlie Kirk, this is what and why they're celebrating- a strike against the people who cheer on, encourage, and legitimize killing bad sons [and by extension, them]. (The fact that involved killing someone else's son is not relevant.)
I know that logical thinking is explicitly and openly anathema to a lot of these people, and you haven't claimed otherwise, but how does this square with the fact that jubilation over the killing of Kirk is also an act of cheering on, encouraging, and legitimizing the killing of a son that has been judged to be bad? Doesn't that point to just different ideas of what constitutes "bad" rather than a rejection of the notion that it is possible for a son to be bad enough to deserve killing? That is, things judged to be "bad" by conservative, traditional, "common sense" morality aren't actually bad, while things that they judge to be "bad" by their own personal shiny new progressive morality are actually bad, and sons who are actually bad deserve killing, not sons that have merely been judged by traditional morality.
07mk
11d ago
at least as useful as the equivalent Wikipedia
Not sure what you mean by useful in this case.
I don't mean anything specific, merely the fact that any tool, like an encyclopedia, exists to be used for accomplishing some goal, and, as such, its value comes from its being useful. There are a trillion different metrics that can apply to any given case, but ultimately, it all comes down to, "Does the user find the tool useful for accomplishing the user's goals?"
Wikipedia has some level of usefulness, as determined by people who use it, including, presumably, yourself. My question was, if, according to whatever metric you personally use to determine if some encyclopedia is useful for the goals you want to accomplish, Grokipedia consistently (or possibly even strictly) outperformed Wikipedia, would you consider the project of Grokipedia to be worthwhile?
Your answer tells me Yes, that your criticism is based around the usefulness (lack thereof) of the text, rather than around how that text was produced. Which satisfies my curiosity.
07mk
11d ago
No idea what Elon is hoping to accomplish with this but I'm going to call him a huge dum dum for releasing this nonsense.
I'm curious, since most/all of your complaints about Grokipedia seem to be about its current (in)ability to consistently produce useful text for an encyclopedia entry: if XAI, through some sort of engineering ingenuity, was able to improve Grokipedia, using only modern and plausible near-future AI tech (i.e. almost certainly something LLM-based), by the time it hits version 1.0, such that, any given text produced for an entry is provably at least as useful as the equivalent Wikipedia (or other reference of your choice) text, as measured by any and all metrics you personally find meaningful in this context, without reverting to fuzzy copy-paste or summarizing the existing Wiki (or other reference) text, would you see this endeavor by Elon as worthwhile?
If not, then what would Grokipedia have to accomplish, or what would its underlying technology have to be based on (or at least not be based on), for you to consider it to be a useful AI-based encyclopedia?
07mk
11d ago
I just want to say, given all the talk about the Sleeping Beauty Problem here, I think the ~10 year old video game Zero Time Dilemma, which is where I learned of it, might be up the alleys of many people here. It's the 3rd game in a series, with the 2nd one, Virtue's Last Reward, being focused around the prisoner's dilemma. All 3 are escape-room games with anime-style art and voiced visual novel cut scenes, with the scenarios being Saw-ish where characters awaken trapped in a death game.
07mk
11d ago
Indeed, it is. And by many people's lights, including mine, basically every major religion is isomorphic to a malicious cult. That's a completely irrelevant point to the one that's being made in that comic, though.
07mk
11d ago
I've always taken the point of that pithy line in that comic to be making the point that someone who lacks the faith in the religion and uses the belief as a tool to manipulate others into doing what they want is someone who likely doesn't understand the thinking of someone of the faith, to such an extent that their arguments based on the religion are faulty. In a Dunning-Krueger way, someone who believes he knows enough about a religion he has no faith in to manipulate believers into doing things based on their faith in the religion is someone who doesn't understand what he doesn't understand.
07mk
11d ago
What further AI development would avoid is including a record that no one really cares about in prime real estate within the article.
For something like this, I don't think any reasoning would be needed, or any significant developments in AI development. I don't see why simple reinforcement learning with human feedback wouldn't work. Just have a bunch of generated articles judged based on many factors of that go into how well written an encyclopedia entry is, including good use of prime real estate to provide information that'd actually be interesting to the typical person looking up the entry rather than throwaway trivia. Of course, this would have to be tested empirically, but I don't think we've seen indications that RLHF is incapable of compelling such behavior from an LLM.
07mk
12d ago
But when and how do you sound the alarm when a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime over a country? American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. Alarm fatigue set in, people became habituated to the steady erosion of democratic norms because there wasn't a single act to push them over the edge, just a slowly boiling of the frog of democracy.
Alarm fatigue setting in wasn't a force of nature. It was created by the behavior of the American leftists observing how their alarm wasn't getting the alarmed response they wanted and then doubling down on the alarm in the apparent belief that the level of alarm of the response would be proportional to the level of alarm that they're raising. This, of course, led to a vicious cycle where they would keep doubling down on the alarm, which would further reduce their credibility, which would further lead to less alarmed responses, which would further lead to American leftists doubling down on the alarm, etc. As best as I can tell, we're still in this cycle.
I'm not sure how to break the cycle, but to prevent the cycle, presuming for the sake of argument that Trump is a dictator who had been slowly installing an authoritarian regime in the USA since his first presidency in 2017, I think preventing alarm fatigue by carefully calibrating the alarm raised to be exactly appropriate to Trump's behaviors would have done it, such that the odds of Trump succeeding in his quest to install authoritarianism in the USA with himself as dictator would be significantly lower now in this alternate universe. Unfortunately, we don't live in this alternate universe, but fortunately, we don't need to believe the presumption that we took for the sake of argument.
07mk
12d ago
I agree with this.
After seeing just the initial video, I was probably around 51-60% sure that he used a shock collar.
After his attempt at explaining away the collar the next day, it shot up to 95-99%. Without taking into account the fact that all analysis of the video shows that the collar he showed is consistent with a shock collar with its removable prongs removed and then taped over and is not known to be consistent with any vibrating-but-not-shocking collar as he claimed, the simple fact that he presented the collar the way he did, briefly showing in his hand, with huge chunks of it covered by his fingers, barely holding it still for more than 0.3 seconds before taking it away from camera view, was enough. Someone who's been on camera as much as Piker knows how things look on screen, and if he were genuinely motivated to reveal the honest truth that he truly was not using a shock collar, he would have shown the collar in a different manner, by holding it by part of the strap and slowly rotating it around in front of the camera after verifying its focus, while making sure there was minimal movement besides the rotation, so that every part of the collar could be seen clearly. And he would have done this during the stream in which he was accused, not on the next stream (the fact that a multimillionaire like him didn't find a decoy non-shock collar in that time that looked similar to the shock collar when worn by a dog in that time is curious - either hubris or just the limits of physical reality).
And, of course, this was also after he and/or his followers claimed that the yelp was caused by the dog clipping its nail on the bed - something quite possible, but also something quite non-evident in the video. This claim was memory-holed basically within a day, replaced with the "it's a vibration collar, not shock collar" claim.
This sort of behavior is consistent with someone who believes he was caught shocking his dog and highly inconsistent with someone who believes he was falsely accused of shocking his dog. If Piker believes that he was caught shocking his dog, then I believe it too.
I'll also add that, given how easy it is to look up and see the primary sources for oneself, anyone who's defaulting to ignorance and just listening to what people on various "sides" are telling them to think is someone I believe is motivated to remain ignorant for fear of finding out the truth (or just someone who's not interested in it).
This is a reality that I think any honest feminist has to deal with. Is feminism about freedom for women, or is it about a better life for women, as measured by their own personal satisfaction? It would be an incredibly convenient world if prioritizing the former led to the latter, but the evidence seems quite clear that it is not the case and, in fact, there's strong reason to believe that it leads to the opposite of the latter.
And, as a feminist, I find it very easy to square: feminism should prioritize freedom (to equalize it between the sexes) over life satisfaction, and the costs to the women whose lives are now less satisfying due to feminism (but more free) is worth it for the benefit to the women whose lives are both more satisfying and more free. I just wish more feminists would openly and honestly acknowledge and state as such, that there will be tradeoffs, because there always are, and that some people deserve to suffer not because they're morally or ethically bad or whatever, but merely because they lack the wisdom/intelligence/etc. to make choices that lead to better outcomes for themselves when given the freedom to do so, compared to the alternative where they were not given the freedom.
This, of course, applies not just to feminism but more broadly to most/all liberalizing/libertarian ideologies. And the same criticisms as above apply just as well to those.
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