07mk
11mo ago
As best as I can tell, voting for a third party candidate is about as worthless as any other vote in this context. The odds that my one vote is what takes some third party candidate up from 4.99% to 5.00% or whatever the threshold is is astronomically low. The odds that my one vote takes the candidate's vote count across some threshold such that it allows the party to garner greater clout in some meaningful, true way is much higher, since there are many many such thresholds, but it's still astronomically small.
The defense of forcing background diversity is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.
This isn't really a good characterization of DEI policies. You'd have to replace "background" with something like "superficial" or "demographic." But, in any case, the argument still works when considering "background," as below.
"you need more [women/blacks/etc] because it will add perspectives you haven't considered"
These are what I'd consider strawman/weakman versions of DEI, not the actual defensible portion of DEI. Even DEI proponents don't tend to say that the mere shade of someone's skin is, in itself, something that makes their contribution to the organization better. The argument is that the shade of their skin has affected their life experiences (perhaps you could call this their background - but, again, DEI isn't based on those life experiences, it's based on the superficial characteristics) in such a way as to inevitably influence the way they think, and the addition of diversity in the way people think is how they contribute better to the organization. This argument has significant leaps of faith that make it fall apart on close inspection, but it's still quite different from saying something like that someone's skin color has direct influence to diversity of thought, which would be a leap very few people would be willing to make.
Whereas with targeting ideological diversity, someone who has a different ideology, by definition, adds a different perspective. That is a direct targeting of the actual thing that people are considering as being helpful to the organization, i.e. diversity of thought.
So again, no, the very concept of "DEI for conservatives," at least in the context of diversity of thought, is just incoherent. If people were calling for putting conservative quotas in the NBA or something, that might work as a comparison.
07mk
2mo ago
No, it is not identical. I explained the significant difference in the above comment. DEI is specifically about adding diversity of things believed to be correlated with diversity of thought while this is an actual instance of directly adding diversity of thought. There's plenty to criticize about adding diversity of thought in this way, but it's categorically different from adding diversity of demographic characteristics under the belief that adding such diversity would increase diversity of thought.
07mk
4mo ago
I'm familiar with the concepts and metaphor you mention here. Could you outline how that applies to this situation? The Constitution is just a piece of paper, much like Executive Orders by the POTUS are - they only mean things insofar as people behave as if they mean things. The POTUS can ignore the Constitution, and his underlings can ignore the POTUS's EOs, and in either case, they'll face consequences only to the extent that people who have the power to inflict consequences on them choose to exercise this power. Is the contention here that Trump is such a cult of personality that this particular EO wouldn't hold up in court or any Constitutional scrutiny, but Trump's underlings will just follow it anyway? If so, it seems that the danger is in Trump being such a cult of personality, rather than any particular EO he might write.
07mk
8mo ago
Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.
The issue is that "we aren't the progressives of the past" is the stance of the progressives of today. So saying that doesn't escape one from repeating the mistakes of the past; it's how you repeat the mistakes of the past.
07mk
3d ago
If she's the type of person who would quit over her company's LLM generating text like that, then it's certainly a good thing that she did quit.
07mk
3mo ago
If the dog was playing chess using some method that was not like how humans play chess, and which couldn't generalize to being able to play well, the joke wouldn't be very funny.
Humor is subjective and all that, but I don't understand this perspective. I'd find the joke exactly as funny no matter what way the dog was playing chess, whether it was thinking through its moves like a human theoretically is, or, I dunno, moving pieces by following scents that happened to cause its nose to push pieces in ways that followed the rules and was good enough to defeat a human player at some rate greater than chance. The humor in the joke to me comes from the player downplaying this completely absurd super-canine ability the dog has, and that ability remains the same no matter how the dog was accomplishing this, and no matter if it wouldn't imply any sort of general ability for the dog to become better at chess. Simply moving the pieces in a way that follows the rules most of the time would already be mindblowingly impressive for a dog, to the extent that the joke would still be funny.
07mk
4mo ago
We don't know the "ground truth" either, though. All the information that we parse, such as touching the Earth or seeing the moon in the sky or through a telescope are basically hallucinations created by our brains based on the sensory input that we take in through detection mechanisms in our cells. We have to trust that the qualia that we experience are somewhat accurate representations of the "ground truth." Our experience is such that we perceive reality accurately enough such that we can keep surviving both as individuals and as a species, but who knows just how accurate that really is?
LLMs are certainly far more limited compared to us in the variety of sensory input they can take in, or how often it can update itself permanently based on that sensory input, and the difference in quantity is probably large enough to have a quality of its own.
07mk
7mo ago
This comment suffers from implying that a woman having a bodily feature that women are known to have can't also make the woman look mannish.
07mk
2mo ago
I probably wouldn't have guessed that this article was almost purely generated by AI if I hadn't been primed on it beforehand. Looking at it with that priming, I'm still not convinced that it was a pure copy-paste GPT job, though certainly it's filled with phrasing that, having been primed, strike me as being from an LLM, such as "While some applauded the self-deprecating humor, others criticized the segment for reinforcing cultural stereotypes" or "As speculation mounts over the 2028 Democratic field, Walz offers a glimpse into his political philosophy for the years ahead." Is there any direct evidence of it being LLM-generated?
But more to the point, I don't see why most people would care if this was purely AI generated, other than perhaps this author Quincy Thomas's employers and his competitors in the journalism industry. Particularly for what seems to be intended to be a pretty dry news article presenting a bunch of facts about what some politicians said. This isn't some personal essay or a long-form investigative report or fiction (even in those, I wouldn't care if those were purely LLM-generated as long as they got the job done, but I can see a stronger case for why that would matter for those). This kind of article seems exactly like the kind of thing that we'd want LLMs to replace, and I'd just hope that we could get enough of a handle on hallucinations such that we wouldn't even need a human like Quincy Thomas to verify that the quotes and description of events actually matched up to reality before hitting "publish."
Once some fairly reputable news outlet gets sued for defamation for publishing some hallucination that was purely LLM generated and failing to catch it with whatever safeguards that are in place, that's something I'd be interested to see how it plays out. At the rate things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if that happened in the next 5 years.
07mk
2mo ago
"DEI for conservatives" or "ideology DEI" isn't really a coherent concept, because DEI is giving advantages to or having quotas for people specifically on the basis of characteristics that have no direct relation to their ability to contribute to the organization, motivated heavily by the belief that these characteristics have some correlation to the actual meaningful characteristics. Giving conservatives preferential treatment or using a conservative "Czar" to oversee such things is categorically different from that, because ideology - and specifically a diversity of ideology - does directly influence someone's ability to contribute to the organization, and certainly positively in this specific context.
I'd say that any well motivated academic would find such a regime to be useless, because they already prioritized diversity of thought in their hiring and admissions practices. Unfortunately, evidently, this has not been the case. Government mandate doesn't seem like a good solution to me, but honestly, I'm not sure if there's a good solution. The only real point of optimism I see is that this could teach academic institutions in the future to better regulate their ideological biases, such that the government doesn't become motivated to come in and regulate it for them. But if I'm being pessimistic, I'd say that Harvard's behavior shows that they're more likely to double down and circle the wagons further in the future, which will further discredit them as institutions for generating knowledge, which leaves a vacuum that is both bad in itself and will almost definitely be filled by things much worse.
07mk
4mo ago
Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?
There's a difference between coordinated efforts to selectively highlight polls that are positive for your side and actually manipulating poll results to appear positive for your side. The discussion seems to be about the latter. The former is bad, but the latter is arguably worse.
The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.
This, I agree with. As I've written before, I struggle to see why people would believe that polls showing their preferred side winning would improve the odds of their side winning, since I could come up with multiple equally plausible mechanisms by which it could help or hurt. But it seems common knowledge enough that many/most people do believe that this is how it works, and one shouldn't feign ignorance of this very possibly false narrative.
07mk
9mo ago
I think if the reins of any election audit were handed over to Trump himself, with the final report requiring his sign-off, this would convince all but the most hardcore of Republican partisans/conspiracy theorists that a Trump loss in the election was the correct result. I don't know if such a thing would be unconstitutional, though; if it isn't, then Congress should be able to pass whatever laws necessary to allow such an audit to happen.
07mk
9mo ago
I've heard that it was actually by and for men who love overweight women who wanted both to encourage more overweight women and a group where it's easy to meet a lot of overweight women, though I haven't checked deeply for the veracity. Perhaps it's been fully coopted by overweight women by now, though, regardless of the origins.
07mk
9mo ago
When encountering HBD for the first time, this sort of thing was also my conclusion on what a good, fair system would work like. From what I can tell, one of the most prominent mainstream faces of HBD, Charles Murray, largely follows the same reasoning, leading to him supporting UBI (which isn't IQ-based affirmative action, but is meant to alleviate some of the same problems, by guaranteeing that no matter how bad you are at making money due to any reason, including low intelligence, you have some guaranteed income you can depend on for survival).
This is one reason why I find the argument that HBD needs to be suppressed, lest people use it to justify racism. Believing that belonging to a race that happens to have average high IQ or even having high IQ oneself entitles one to greater rights and privileges than those who don't happen to belong to such a race or don't happen to have high IQ is something separate and distinct from believing that different races have different average IQ, and the latter doesn't cause the former.
07mk
3d ago
Computer scientists call their field computer science despite it being more about mathematics and logic than science, and despite the field having far less to do with computers than one might expect.
Sure, and when I say that I have a "theory" about who took the cookies from the cookie jar, it doesn't meet the same bar that the "theory of relativity" or "theory of evolution" meet in terms of scientific evidence and consensus. That doesn't make my theory not a theory, it just reflects the squishiness of word definitions. Likewise for "science" and "intelligence."
Normies have been calling computer opponents in video games "AI" since the 80's despite them knowing that they clearly aren't "intelligent"
I disagree. I think people consider, say, the ghosts in Pacman or the imps in 1993's Doom "intelligent." Not sentient, not logical, not conscious, but certainly intelligent. Hence the willingness to use the term "enemy artificial intelligence" to describe them. This willingness reflects - a possibly subconscious - understanding that "intelligence" doesn't indicate sentience, consciousness, logical thinking, etc.
07mk
30d 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).
I don't think either are particularly moral, and it's a cultural battle to be waged against both. I don't think we'll ever convince fellow humans to stop lying to manipulate people, but I can at least imagine a world where we universally condemn media companies who publish AI slop.
So I do think there's a big weakness with LLMs in that we don't quite have a handle on how to robustly or predictably reduce hallucinations like we can with human hallucinations and fabrications. But that's where I think the incentive of the editors/publishers come into play. Outlets that publish falsities by their human journalists lose credibility and can also lose lawsuits, which provide incentives for the people in charge to check the letters their human journalists generate before publishing them, and I see similar controls as being effective for LLMs.
Now, examples like Rolling Stone's A Rape on Campus article show that this control system isn't perfect, particularly when the incentives for the publishers, the journalists, and the target audience are all aligned with respect to pushing a certain narrative rather than conveying truth. I don't think AI text generators exacerbate that, though.
I also don't think it's possible for us to enter a world where we universally condemn media companies who publish AI slop, though, unless "slop" here refers specifically to lies or the like. Given how tolerant audiences are of human-made slop and how much cheaper AI slop is compared to that, I just don't see there being enough political or ideological will to make such condemnation even a majority, much less universal.
07mk
2mo ago
Hopefully this tech will become portable soon enough that anyone can just take out their smartphones and pop in their earbuds to get around the issue. https://x.com/shweta_ai/status/1912536464333893947?t=45an09jJZmFgYosbqbajog&s=19
07mk
3mo ago
As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?
I always used to be confused why people considered this a gotcha or a particularly interesting question, cuz I thought it was obvious that there was absolutely no moral impropriety in either case, that only people who held on to silly superstitions would think otherwise, and I thought that this was basically the the position of most Democrats/liberals.
Now I understand that I was the weird/foolish one for actually believing people when they said that they were liberal.
It's still silly superstition, though.
07mk
4mo ago
Well, if enough people are bad at using language properly in the exact same way, then I'd argue that it's the language that's not proper, not the people. It's hard to say where the tipping point is and if the tipping point has been reached, though.
07mk
8mo ago
I thought this comment was a one-liner that was poking fun at the types of humor-policing busybodies that would unironically use a statement like "do better" in response to a harmless one-liner. The sub-thread that followed below indicates that I was mistaken. FWIW, I thought both one-liners were funny and added value to this forum. The sub-thread that followed, less so.
07mk
8mo ago
The days of major news media sources paying generous salaries for skilled, intelligent investigators with deep knowledge of some beat and at least some sense of ethics are gone, maybe forever, with the drive to the bottom for advertising money.
I think skill/intelligence/expertise and having at least some sense of ethics are somewhat different with respect to salary levels. Certainly, it's easier to be ethical if you're well compensated, but I don't think having at least some sense of ethics when doing journalism requires some generous salary that is beyond the capabilities of these companies to pay now, and plenty of not-very-well compensated journalists (and other workers in general) can be and have been known to behave with at least some sense of ethics. If the lower budget to pay salaries means compromising on skills, intelligence, expertise, and ethics, among other things, they could have decided compromise less on ethics at the cost of compromising on other things, so that their journalists would have at least some sense of ethics, even if they weren't up to the same level of skill, intelligence, or deep knowledge of some beat as the other options.
Even the ownership seems to be mostly people who primarily want to either protect themselves from too-harsh criticism or use them as a weapon to attack their enemies, and so is willing to accept losses or much lower profits than a disinterested investor would expect.
I do think this is likely the biggest factor. It's hard to say exactly what determines how ethical any given journalist or individual in general would behave, but I think the leadership and company culture likely has a lot of influence, moreso than the budgets available for salaries.
07mk
8mo ago
It was a joke.
I see, it must have gone over my head, but that's not an unusual experience for me with jokes, unfortunately. So is it that you were just being ironic, and that your meaning was the opposite, that the mysticism around art being imbued with a part of the artist's soul is still quite common in artists' circles, with a part of Duchamp's soul being in that toilet just as much as, e.g. part of Van Gogh's soul being in his self portrait?
But that's qualitatively different from such a containment thread. The posts in such a containment thread would be determined by things like: what type of person would enjoy posting/reading in such a thread, what type of prompts would such people use, what LLMs such people would choose to use, and what text output such people would deem as meeting the threshold of being good enough to share in such a thread. You'd get none of that by simulating a forum via LLM by yourself.
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