07mk
3mo ago
In this specific sort of example, the cheat code that people discovered was claiming that due process that includes things like trying to figure out the facts of the matter based on evidence was misogynistic when applied to women accusing men of bad sexual behavior. This, I think, was an instantiation of the larger principle that "lived experiences" described by people who were categorized as "oppressed" were incontrovertible. It seems to me that more and more people are growing wise to this vulnerability, which makes me wonder what the next cheat code will be, to circumvent inconvenient things like the sort of due process you're talking about.
07mk
2mo ago
Actions speak louder than words. The fact they forcibly butted him aside due to the age concerns should be enough proof.
All that is proof of is that they believed that Biden, given the emperor-has-no-clothes moment at the debate, was less likely to garner more electoral votes against Trump than an alternative. The action of taking your hand out of the cookie jar after you're caught with your hand in it isn't proof of any sort of owning up to screwing up by trying to steal the cookies in the first place.
I agree, though, that actions do speak louder than words. If all the White House staff and journalists that ran cover for Biden's infirmity had actively pointed spotlights at the past words and articles that they had stated and published that had misled people, followed by resigning and swearing never to pursue politics or journalism again, those actions would be proof enough in my view. Actions that don't go quite as far could also serve as proof, depending on the specifics, but it would have to be in that ballpark.
07mk
24d ago
I can't see any theoretical justification for it.
This is the way I always understood it. Lacking the ability to detect any internal experience other than our own, the way we distinguish between 2 different things is by applying input to them and seeing if there's differences in output, e.g. we shine light on it and detect what qualia the light that reflects off of it and into our eyeballs generate in our minds. Detecting intelligence isn't as simple as detecting the color or shape of something and wouldn't involve inputting light rays but rather words to see what words get returned in response. If there's no way to distinguish between 2 different entities in this way, then it makes no sense to say that 1 has human-level intelligence while the other lacks it. For that to be the case, there must be some way to induce different outputs from those 2 things with the same input. In something relating to intelligence, anyway; input-output of words probably don't cover the entirety of all possible detection mechanisms, but they do seem to me to cover a lot.
This seemed like a particularly bad and uncharitable post by Scott. The examples he chooses at the top worded in what seems like an intentionally ridiculous manner, e.g. characterizing it as "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients," rather than "the purpose ... is to cure as many cancer patients as possible, constrained on the available resources and laws, which happens to be two-thirds of them." Or "The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia" rather than "the purpose ... is to defend Ukraine, constrained on the available resources and international politics, with a years-long stalemate against Russia an acceptable result."
To the point at hand, I always saw the phrase as something riffing on the same sort of concept as "sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." All systems have both intended consequences and unintended consequences, this is obvious. But what's troublesome is, all systems have unforeseeable unintended consequences, this is also obvious; as such, it's incumbent on the people who design systems to include subsystems to detect and react to unforeseen unintended consequences. And if they didn't include a subsystem like that or didn't make such a subsystem robust, then we can conclude that the purpose of the system included being entirely tolerant of whatever unintended consequence is at hand. And in practice by my observation, it often tends to involve, as one of its primary purposes, the designers of the system feeling really good about themselves and their conscious intentions, versus having the purpose of actually accomplishing whatever they consciously intended to accomplish.
07mk
3mo ago
Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
As someone who voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Kamala in 2024, I second what Folamh3 responded about this apparent arguments-as-soldiers worldview. But I also want to add on that, we can combine the last 2 paragraphs of that comment to see that, from a purely selfish, power-hungry perspective, this sort of thinking is counterproductive. There's no shortage of very good, very well-supported, and very non-partisan reasons why Trump is and would be a terrible POTUS. Yet much of the messaging against him was so filled with hyperbole that even in 2016, calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" or whatever was considered cliche. Things have tended to escalate since.
And this has resulted largely in the discrediting of the people and organizations that kept up this hyperbole. When someone keeps demonstrating that they want to send a message in order to accomplish a certain goal instead of wanting to describe reality accurately (which, at a minimum, requires taking a highly skeptical view of one's own biases and welcoming criticism and feedback from people who disagree with you vehemently), then other people notice and lower their credibility accordingly. I believe it was a commenter here that described it as something like "Media keeps pressing the 'attack Trump/hurt own credibility' button" or something like that, and that's what I've been seeing play out over and over again over the past decade. And it's resulted in people seeking out and even creating alternative sources of information and commentary that mainstream news outlets used to be the primary sources for. Arguably, Musk's purchase of Twitter was also an effect. And this has tended to help Trump. And not just Trump, but also people who actually are the types of genocidal fascists that his critics make him out as.
Which, IMHO, has always been the biggest danger to this whole Trump thing that's been going on the past decade. Again, as far back as 2016, I recall reading someone, maybe on SlateStarCodex, saying that they're not afraid of Trump, they're afraid of who might come after Trump. Now, I'm somewhat afraid of Trump, but not that much more than any other Republican POTUS, but I'm definitely more afraid of what could rise up from the farther, even more extreme right wing due to much of the left having so completely discredited its ability to criticize such people.
I think the only way to gain back credibility is to demonstrate that there are very powerful, very influential internal controls that engage in self-reflection and self-criticism of one's own side, in a way that attempts at getting at the truth, especially if the truth helps one's opponents and hurts one's friends. Unfortunately, I've seen a dearth of such things over the past decade, though it's not zero.
I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson.
07mk
12d ago
I played 16 recently based on enjoying the demo a ton, especially the real-time combat. Unfortunately, the full game didn't add a whole lot of depth to the combat, and the story ended up being a major disappointment, going a very well-trodden boring route after the demo appeared to set things up for a really intriguing medieval politics kind of plot. Really sad that what could've been a very bold step into a new direction for the franchise ended up being so half-assed.
I never finished 13, but I still think it has the best combat system out of any FF game I've played, including 7 Remake. Almost as a rule, I have a great distaste for turn-based combat systems, but I found the whole Paradigm Shift system of changing party members' roles in real-time during a battle and spending 90% of the time doing tiny damage to stagger the enemy so that you can deplete 90% of their HP in that 10% stagger window to be highly engaging. A shame about the storytelling, worldbuilding, and hyperlinear levels for the first 20 hours of the game.
I'll always have a soft spot for 8 for being the 1st JRPG I played and blowing me away with its huge explorable world and cinematic cutscenes. Even if the Junction system turned out to be pretty bad, and the story went off the rails near the end. The space base scene and Laguna's love story will always tug my heart strings.
All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.
It's probably an extreme way to describe it, but "remaining forever a child" seems to describe pretty accurately the kind of behavior that's encouraged in the type of nerdy/blue tribe/white collar culture this person likely grew up in. There's a reason why the term "adulting" was invented (or at least popularized) by and for people in such a culture, after all. A major part of the culture is trusting authority figures as experts who are able to guide you to the truth in a way that's superior and counterintuitive to the rubes who use their intuition and personal anecdotes to jump to conclusions. This, of course, makes sense as a child; you aren't yet equipped with the maturity with which to make judgment calls on most important things, and that's why most important decisions about your life are made by adults who theoretically have your best interests in mind. But children don't become mature adults with good judgment merely through time; it requires practice and training, which are highly constrained in these environments.
So when they're taught about the inaccuracies of stereotypes as a child and how all of society was sexist and misogynistic against women for entirely arbitrary reasons because men and women are same in every way that matters, many of them believe it and many of them refuse to believe their lying eyes. After all, their own judgment is inherently suspect for having been raised in this oppressive patriarchy which has forever sullied it with bias that they will never escape from even if they dedicate their entire lives to doing so, which is nonetheless the duty of any human being who wants to be a Decent Person.
Now, someone still holding onto this belief by the age of 38... this means that this person grew up in the 90s-00s at the latest, during which time this stuff wasn't nearly as extreme as it was in the 00s-10s, so this person is an extreme case. I'd wager the neurodivergence played a significant factor. I grew up in the 90s-00s in some of the more extreme areas of the country where this culture was dominant, and most people understood that there were significant sex differences in athletic ability (though it was nowhere near universal, especially among younger people!), so either this person was raised in one of the few even more extreme areas, or was particularly extreme in his way of thinking or both.
Edit: As an anecdote, one of my major hobbies is ultimate Frisbee, which is one of the bluest of blue sports due in large part to how it's primarily introduced to people in college. Right now in our local leagues, it's just taken for granted that transwomen should compete with women in single-gender leagues and as women when they want to in mixed-gender leagues (teams of 7 with either 4m-3f or 3m-4f at a time, usually). (We also don't use terms like male or female because that's offensive, but rather Defender of Men and Defender of Women and Defender of Choice for transwomen who want to choose depending on the point - the fact that this means we call men DOMs has been a source of amusement). Playing pickup, I've heard people seriously argue that a particularly good female player there, who outplays most of the males in pickup, could make it to the local elite-level men's team (has won the national championship recently and has gotten to the top 8 regularly) if she chose to try out.
07mk
1mo ago
The steelman would probably be that they've transitioned from one gender to no gender, rather than transitioning from one gender to another gender.
The true reason is probably that logic is an oppressive cis-heteropatriarchal construct, and this person ended up genuinely feeling like they're whatever identities were most useful and convenient for them in this context, which in this case happened to be both agender and trans.
07mk
3mo ago
I haven't read the Hanania article and thus can't speak to his arguments, but if more economically libertarian states tend to have more abundant housing, then that seems to be the mechanism by which Americans come to preferring to live in such states. Revealed preference for economically libertarian states doesn't mean that someone is judging states on the basis of their economic policies and preferring to move to one that's more economically libertarian. Revealed preference means that states that are more economically libertarian tend to create conditions that cause more people to decide that moving there is a better decision than moving elsewhere. The abundance of housing could be one of them. So I wouldn't say that that's misleading.
07mk
1mo ago
I see a couple of issues with that scenario.
One is that there will almost always be plausible deniability with respect to LLM usage. There would have to be a slip-up of the sort of including meta-text that chatbot-style LLMs provide - something like "Certainly! Here is the next page of the story, where XYZ happens." - for it to be definitive proof, and I'd expect that the audience and judges would pick up on that early enough to prevent such authors from becoming high status. That said, it could still get through, and also someone who did a good enough job hiding this early on could slip up later in her career, casting doubt on her original works.
But the second, bigger issue, is that even if this were definitively proven, with the author herself outright claiming that she typed in a one-word prompt into ChatGPT 10 to produce all 70,000 words of her latest award-winning novel, this could just be justified by the publishing industry and the associated awards on the basis of her lacking the privilege that white/straight/cis/male authors have, and this LLM usage merely ensures equity by giving her and other oppressed minorities the writing ability that privileged people are just granted due to their position in this white supremacist patriarchal society. Now, you might think that this would simply discredit these organizations in the eyes of the audience, and it certainly will for some, but I doubt that it would be some inflection point or straw that breaks the camel's back. I'd predict that, for the vast majority who are already bought in, this next spoonful would be easy to swallow.
07mk
1mo ago
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI
(Emphasis added).
If they admit to using ChatGPT, how can they claim they didn't use generative AI? ChatGPT and all LLMs are a type of generative AI, i.e. they generate strings of text. ChatGPT, I believe, is also trained on copyright-protected works without permission from the copyright holders, which is the criterion many people who hate AI consider to qualify as the generative AI "stealing" from authors and artists.
Just based on this description, it sounds like these WorldCon people are trying to thread a needle that can't be. They should probably just say, "Yes, we used generative AI to make our lives easier. Yes it was trained on copyright protected works without permission. No, we don't think that's 'stealing.' Yes, this technology might replace authors like you in the future, and we are helping to normalize its usage. If you don't like it, go start your own AIFreeWorldCon with blackjack and hookers."
07mk
23d ago
In my experience so far, for every one AI-generated artpiece that was a genuine improvement over the alternative of "nothing" or "imagining it by reading a text meme", there are 10 thousand pieces of absolute slop that should have never been published with less effort than it took me to scroll past.
I see similar things on my social media, and I feel the exact opposite. The things that people call "AI slop" are, almost universally, things that would have been considered incredible works in the pre-generative AI era. Even today, they often have issues with things like hands, perspective, and lighting, and though they're often very easy to fix, just as often they aren't fixed before they're posted online. But even considering those issues, if someone came across such works in 2021, most people would find them quite aesthetically pleasing, if not beautiful.
So now we're inundated with this aesthetically pleasing slop that was generated and posted thoughtlessly by some lazy prompter, to the point that we've actually grown tired and bored of it. I see this as an absolute win, and I think my experience on the internet has become more pleasant and more beautiful because of it. I see it as akin to how Big Macs have become considered kind of slop food and eating it every day - an option almost anyone in the Western world has - would mark you as low status in many crowds, but for most of human existence, if you had that easy and cheap access to food that was that palatable and that nutritious, you'd be considered to be living an elite life. I think, for such access to such high quality food to have become so banal as to be considered slop is a sign of a great, prosperous world that is better than the alternative. So too for images (and video and music soon, hopefully).
07mk
3mo ago
Weak men are superweapons.
When your prior comment says
Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.
I'm not sure how one could interpret this other than that you're full-throatedly defending the weakest of the weakmen.
07mk
4mo ago
Other times, your foot gets infected, and if you don't cut off everything from the knee down, your entire body shuts down. And other times, some cells in your breast starts reproducing uncontrollably, and if you don't cut off most of the breast, again, your entire body shuts down. The pain and loss of those healthy cells - a majority of the cells that were cut off were probably healthy! - are real and shouldn't be downplayed. But sometimes it's the least worst option.
I'd say that infections that spread toxicity through the rest of the body or a cancerous growth that grows uncontrollably in a way that crowds out and kills the healthy cells are better metaphors for this situation in academia than a prefrontal cortex sometimes not making the best decisions.
07mk
2mo ago
No, "paranoid", "not sharing", and "psychopathy" have zip-all to do with morality.
I'd generally agree that these aren't moral concepts. Given that they are neither moral nor immoral, and that this system of "psychopathy with a makeover" that makes sense to "paranoid" people "who don't understand the concept of sharing" keeps leading to stable societies with people leading prosperous lives, when instability and poverty has been the norm for most lives anywhere, I have to conclude that "psychopathy" and "paranoia" and "not sharing" are really cool things that I want more of, for the purpose of my own benefit from living in a stable and prosperous society and from the good feelings I get from believing that I support a system that benefit more people in general. Why would I want to come up with an alternative?
07mk
3mo ago
The dems offer a lot: student loan forgiveness, healthcare reform, housing reform, etc.
Do they? One of my major disappointments with the Democratic party since Obama's election is that there has been very little talk about implementing nationalized healthcare beyond what the ACA accomplished. Pre-ACA, the thought among much of the left was that it was to be a wedge in an effort to keep the door to just full on nationalized healthcare. At the very least, it seems that that step was indeed effectively irreversible so far, with not a whole lot effort that I can see from Republicans trying to roll it back. But neither have Democrats been trying to push that ratchet further. If Kamala ran on socialized healthcare or other forms of significant healthcare reform, she didn't do a good job of advertising it.
I'm also not really aware of Democrats making much noise in terms of housing reform. Given how locally Democrat-controlled areas tend not to have the best reputation in terms of accomplishing lower housing costs, I'm not sure they have much credibility for it, either.
07mk
2mo ago
So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty?
I probably implied it in that comment, and in this comment, I'm explicitly stating it, yes, that a minority of people in societies that have private property live in poverty.
More than what? The USA benefits more people on average than which countries? Compared to which periods in history?
For a current-time example, I'd say the USA compares favorably against North Korea, though perhaps South Korea vs North Korea would be a better example, as USA is only one specific and rather idiosyncratic example of a society that has private property rights, and South Korea is probably more similar to North Korea than USA is.
Trick questions, actually, because there's a fundamental flaw in your argument no matter how you'd answer them: better-than-worse does not substitute for as-good-as-better. Those are two mutually exclusive orientations. Yours is the former. No matter how much better than others an example might be, it says nothing about how good it realistically could be.
Well, the problem here is that you also say nothing about how good it realistically could be. So, how good could it realistically be? I'm all ears. As of yet, you've described the current system with words like "psychopathic" done by "paranoid" people, which I agree with you are completely morally neutral. As such, I have no desire to overthrow this non-immoral system which keeps giving us very good results, unless there's some other system in store for something even better to replace it. So what are those other ideas?
07mk
2mo ago
A: "For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction." It's extremely disturbing to me that anybody would need that risk pointed out to them.
B: I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"
Reading this reminded me of the whole "woke right" thing, which I don't know who coined, but which I've seen pushed heavily by James Lindsay (of Sokal^2 fame) to denigrate the identarian right as an attempt to prevent the right wing from falling into the sort of insane and extremely harmful identity/resentment-based politics as the left has been for the past couple decades. I don't know how successful it has been or will be, but I'll admit that despite seeing it mostly as crying wolf at first, I see signs that this is a legit potential problem worth preventing.
But what worries me about this is, what happens if we apply this sort of thinking to the sort of liberal enlightenment-style thinking that people like Lindsay and myself espouse? If we push things like free speech, free inquiry, freedom of/from religion, the scientific method, critical thinking, democracy, and such too much, are we destined to have a pendulum swing in the other direction, such that we'll get extreme forms of authoritarian or irrational societies in the future? Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?
I guess the whole thing about "history repeats" and "if there's anything we can learn from history, it's that people don't learn from history" is probably true and also pretty depressing.
07mk
1mo ago
I absolutely think they should be. Now, maybe it's not practical to check each student's individual political preferences and assign bespoke assignments for them on that basis (which could be gamed anyway). Rather, humanities-based courses should test students on their ability to defend a wide variety of different, highly offensive and ideally "dangerous" ideas in whatever topics are at hand, to stimulate actually learning how to think versus what to think.
Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever, without there being any sort of noticeable progress whatsoever. I just know that that was how I was educated, and it seemed to work for me and my classmates (but of course I'd think that, and so my belief that it seemed to work should count for approximately nothing), but even if it did, that doesn't mean that it's generalizable.
07mk
3mo ago
Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost?
I think this is a major part of it. There has been plenty written about how the purity-spiraling progressive left, i.e. the woke/idpol/crt/dei/sjw crowd, are following a religion that fills a vacuum left by the rejection of traditional religions, so I won't reiterate it here. The thing about religions is that you don't need to win in any way that makes sense in the real world to win according to the tenets of your religion. In the case of this religion, being more pure than thou is one way of winning.
And likely there's a major self-validation component to it as well, in that this group of people tend to be far more individualistic than most people, valuing freedom and self-expression far greater than most people. This is evident in many things, including their hair/tattoo/piercing/fashion choices and their support for transing children. Thus it would make sense that they put greater value in the individual feeling of righteousness they get from putting down someone less pure than them than in their movement winning more supporters and becoming more capable of affecting change in this world.
07mk
4mo ago
Imagine if the Cocoa Cola company had responded to the New Coke debacle with a bunch of attack ads implying their customers were just idiots with bad taste. Or if Johnson & Johnson had responded to the Chicago Tylenol killings with a series of bus ads that read “Tylenol: It’s perfectly safe, you’re just a fucking pussy”
Imagine if you grew up all your life surrounded by people who browbeat each other into certain political/ideological positions through calling them bigoted. Imagine if your entire political/ideological ecosystem of figuring out truth and values is structured around this sort of behavior. Imagine if your entire social media ecosystem is structured around shutting up people that you dislike, while creating just the right amount of space for disagreement to convince you that you're seeing arguments that challenge your beliefs and values without actually challenging your beliefs and values, and you see the people who control the social media companies reinforcing and strengthening this sandbox more and more.
You just might start thinking that this strategy would work when selling products to a mainstream audience. In fact, you might think that you'd be utterly foolish not to use this strategy.
07mk
1mo ago
That's fair, perhaps this "mania," as you call it, might be the immovable object that matches up to the irresistible force of wokeness. I just think that, sans a definitive proof, any denial of LLM-usage from an author that is deemed as sufficiently oppressed would be accepted at face value, with any level of skepticism deemed as Nazi-adjacent and appropriately purged.
07mk
2mo ago
Vibes are very hard to measure, but I do think there's something to the idea that the tariff shenanigans have damaged morale on the right, even if only by causing a rift between Trump supporters who support the tariffs and Trump supporters who see them as entirely self-inflicted suffering. I personally think they'll cause enough economic hardship such that it will actually meaningfully negatively affect Trump support in the long run, but, well, only time will tell.
But this kind of post about vibes just reminded me of a comment I made last year after Harris became the Dem nominee. There was all sorts of talk about how there was some apparent "shift" in the vibes, that Democrats were coming together and becoming energized, and that we were owning the Republicans by calling them "weird," and I thought it all looked like transparent attempts to shift the vibes by declaring the vibes as shifted. I think my skepticism of that turned out to be mostly correct, and I think such skepticism is warranted here. I don't know much about Scott Sumner, but he doesn't seem like a Trump sycophant or even a Trump fan. And only someone who's at least neutral on Trump, if not positive, would have the credibility, in my eyes, to declare "vibes" as shifting away from Trump and towards his enemies, because someone who dislikes Trump would have great incentive to genuinely, honestly, in good faith, believe that the vibes are shifting away from him.
Another issue here is that I don't really see Democrats as being in a good position to capitalize on this apparent vibe shift. People being demoralized on Trump will almost certainly help the Dems, but people can be fickle and vibes can shift back, unless Dems manage to actually lock in the demoralized former Trump fans through some sort of actual positive message.
I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was reminded of how much people were claiming that Samwise was obviously in love with Frodo, rather than that they had a fraternal love for each other as friends, which I saw a bunch in the 2010s. Watching it again now, I can kinda see it that way if I squint, but it definitely strikes me as the modern audience projecting something onto what was likely something inspired by the type of brotherhood that someone like Tolkien probably experienced among men in the early 20th century.
Of course, to a lot of the types of people who see homosexuality in Lord of the Rings, that's just proof that a huge proportion of the men back then were actually in-the-closet homosexuals who just couldn't express their inner innate homosexuality due to the repressive society in which they resided.
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