07mk
3hr ago
These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.
I don't know the solution to this, but I've long thought that one critically important step towards one must be that people both allow for and welcome the expression of values very different from - and explicitly contradictory to - their own, ideally in proportion to how much they disagree with it and how much those values would destroy them if actually adopted IRL. That's the only way, as I see it, that it's possible to reasonably adjudicate different moral values, though that hardly seems sufficient. Unfortunately, I don't know how to create a set of incentives that create this kind of behavior in society at large.
07mk
21hr ago
If we're presuming a benevolent superintelligence, I don't see why simulations couldn't provide exactly the right amount and type of struggle to each individual to provide just the right amount of meaning in their lives such that, at each moment, they genuinely feel like they're leading the most meaningful life they could be living. For all you or I know, we're currently in an alpha version of that simulation right now. Surely such a superintelligence would be familiar with Brave New World and other dystopian fiction and criticisms about them and at least try to route around the pitfalls.
07mk
21hr ago
Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that giving in to populist demands will only make the problem a thousand times worse. Improvements in the economy, particularly in the inequality, seems likely to help, but if it's not done in a way that is credibly completely divorced from the behavior of the Mangiones of the world, it seems only likely to embolden them. Especially since, in the not unlikely case that giving in to populist demands only makes everything worse for the people at the bottom, it will likely cause the Mangione-supporters to double down in the "beatings will continue until morale improves" sort of way that's pretty standard in all politics these days.
07mk
1d ago
It's interesting to me that, as far as I can tell, right now is when OpenAI is the least impressive relative to competitors ever since they kicked off the modern LLM chatbot era with GPT 3.5 almost half a decade ago, and that's when the most violence against its CEO is happening. Even if, somehow, like a video game boss, his murder caused the complete liquidation of OpenAI and disbursement of the proceeds to his murderer, it's doubtful it would put a meaningful dent in the consequences of LLMs in employment and other societal things.
Last week, there was also someone who filmed himself setting fire to a Kimberly Clark warehouse, having been disgruntled over his low pay. He reportedly explicitly compared himself to Luigi Mangione, and I've noticed at least some significant amount of support for him, by the same sorts of people who also lionized Mangione and support the attempts on Altman's life. I don't know where things are going, but I'm pretty sure that more escalation of this type of behavior will lead to nowhere good, triply so for the least well-off parts of society, and I just hope this is a blip instead of a sign of things to come. I'm not sure what else there is to do to stop it other than ramping up law enforcement and making sure that those convicted of such actions get the harshest punishment possible without martyring them. Which doesn't seem like it'd be enough, though.
07mk
1d ago
By arbitrary, I mean that there's no particular characteristics that they must take on, other than the fact that they're fundamental values. A person could have a fundamental value of praising God or of making sure that the final digit of the S&P500 closing value each day is 6, or of watching Mrs. Doubtfire as many times as possible in their lifetime, or anything else. It's arbitrary.
Random, as I understand it, means impossible to predict (if not literally, at least practically). I coin flip is random in that one cannot, with confidence, claim that either of the 2 outcomes (ignoring the edge and the shape of actual IRL coins causing bias - again, practically) is more likely than the other. When I see, say, a woman wearing a nun's habit praying in a church, I believe that can make predictions about her fundamental values that are more likely than chance to be correct.
07mk
1d ago
I interpreted the original hypothetical as Alice being better in all things except for fundamental morality - hence why she thinks something as evil as X is good.
07mk
1d ago
They're arbitrary, but not random. They're not "good and right" in some sort of objective sense, and whether they're worth holding onto would depend heavily on the exact specifics. Whether it's possible not to hold onto those is also a separate question that I think the answer is No to most people in most contexts.
07mk
2d ago
How does the smart, brave, loyal person come to sincerely believe in the absolutely evil and abhorrent X? Is she simply misinformed and deluded? Either she or 'you' or both have fatally misperceived something.
I don't think this follows. I think it's entirely possible for two equally intelligent, brave, loyal, [insert good adjective here] people to look at the same set of facts and come to equal and opposite conclusions about the goodness of the exact same thing, because people can have arbitrary fundamental values that inform every other value they have.
07mk
2d ago
For whatever reason, and I haven't played it recently enough to have a strong impression of why, Halo 2 and Halo 3 didn't seem as bad in this regard, even during the sections that were heavier on flood.
I have a similar impression, and I think it's probably just that god-awful library level in Halo 1, which Bungie learned enough from not to repeat.
The variability in the level design surprised me though. It became more apparent to my more experienced eyes that a few of the levels in the second half of the game are pretty sloppily, borderline amateurishly put together, IMO. Maybe they ran out of time for polish before the deadline. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think I heard Xen suffered from that (Black Mesa tried to "fix" this and utterly ruined it by packing way too much content there - I quit after 2+ hours in Xen, likely only a few hours away from the ending, having grown fatigued of that area). It's kinda crazy to think that HL2 (correction: HL) came out just 2 years after Quake, the game whose engine it was partially built off of (I believe id gave Valve access to some Quake 2 engine material too). In 24 months, they had to put all of that together, enough levels to fill 15-20 hours. Compare that to the amount of content that games with 5+ year development times have today, when building using far more mature engines and tools, as well as well-established blueprints for game design.
07mk
3d ago
As someone who was a teenager gamer when these games came out, I'll add on to agreement with this. Halo was certainly a great, innovative accomplishment in singleplayer fps design, but it doesn't really compare to Half Life in that respect. It'd be like comparing Half Life to Doom or Wolfenstein 3D.
I will say, though, that HL2's ushering in of the era of rollercoaster singleplayer FPSs was an utter travesty. Even as a teenager, I could recognize how vastly inferior HL2 was to 1 in level design, making everything feel completely artificial in how it felt like Valve was sitting over my shoulder and ordering me to "Go there, not there, only here, etc." instead of shoving me into an immersive setting where I have to use my wits and tools to map out the terrain and navigate it successfully. Unsurprisingly, Ravenholm was by far my favorite part of HL2 (and I have very little love for horror games or horror tropes), and I still consider HL2E2 as the best singleplayer FPS I've played, with only maybe Metroid Prime being in the conversation as a competitor.
07mk
3d ago
There was about a 1.5 year period when I was had a passionate love affair with Halo 3 on 360, the last time I devoted any amount of time into an online competitive shooter. I've heard that they've become a lot more sanitized since then, and it's a bit sad that kids these days don't get to have that only weakly-filtered experience of calling and being called "nigger," "faggot," and the occasional "kyke" regularly in a light-hearted competitive environment. The world would likely be a much better place if that were a much more common experience.
07mk
3d ago
Is it not possible or practical to gimp chess engines to play at a level and style equivalent to elite human players? I would have thought that lowering a super-capable tool to human level capability would be possible, but, of course, with something as complicated as chess, it's not just a matter of scaling some number down by 50% or whatever.
07mk
4d ago
My intuition as a complete outsider to chess is that hours of grinding online could get you from low to mid or mid to high, but to reach the truly elite levels of top-10-in-the-world, you really need to spend lots of time competing against people at or near that level. I don't think a billion reps against little leaguers would be as valuable as a thousand against minor leaguers for someone aiming for the MLB. That said, I do wonder if chess engines, given their clear superiority over any and all humans, might enable the best of both worlds, but also, as an outsider, I could be missing some important distinctions.
Do people really think that lack of tournament play in open divisions is what's holding women back, or is this just an excuse/cover to try to get rid of the women's divisions?
I'd guess it's a genuine belief in the former, for the purpose of something like the latter, but rather than to try to get rid of the women's divisions, it's to try to land at a societally mediated conclusion for elite women's evident underperformance in chess compared to elite men's.
07mk
4d ago
Hm, are you pretty knowledgeable about competitive chess, and, if so, do you know if there's any controversy about transwomen competing in the women's division? I wonder if it would create a videogame speedrunner-like situation where basically every last one of the top "woman" speedrunners are male (I'm sure high correlation with autism would play a part, as well as the sex, though I'd also guess that high level chess or speedrunning tends to be disproportionately autistic, both male and female).
I've heard off-hand that men also dominate "sports" like darts or billiards/pool/snooker, despite there being minimal advantage from physical strength in those sports. If that's true, I wonder how much of that's biological in terms of men being innately better at geometry versus biological in terms of men having greater penchant for obsessing over some meaningless task until they achieve mastery versus biological in terms of men having greater incentive to become known for being great at something.
07mk
4d ago
There's a lot of behavior that seems mysterious if "believing that it could ever work for accomplishing the ostensible and stated goals" were a prerequisite for engaging in it. Not just by women from upper class circles, but basically everyone in every context, even the most powerful and influential among us, like some politician or executive blaming others when they fail to get the votes or buyers. I think that people, by and large, don't care about the consequences of their actions and just follow their inner impulses in the moment.
07mk
4d ago
There's a joke I've seen before that is along the lines of "women be shopping = bigoted, white women be shopping = woke" so it doesn't seem to be strictly true that sexism is tolerable while racism and religionism isn't. It seems more to just be directional from minority and "oppressed" groups in the English speaking world to majority groups.
I think this is more or less the correct explanation. It really is just who/whom in its fundamental essence, and trying to make it make sense logically is a fool's errand.
07mk
4d ago
Took the words out of my mouth. Like, literally, I probably typed almost those exact words back in mid-2016, before he got elected. It's been almost a full decade since, and I'm almost impressed at the resilience of people trying to keep doing this. But I guess fatigue is probably the strongest feeling I have at this point.
07mk
4d ago
However, with my girlfriend, we talk every day. Meaning our conversation often feels like a "What did you do today?" conversation, and it often feels surface level stuff. And I'm finding that trying to
Do you have any suggestions for me that I could change to make our daily calls more interesting and engaging?
I am midst a similar situation as you, finding such things trying as well, and my strategy has been to change myself to stop caring about how interesting I find such calls. I've learned to simply see it as just another one of the many boring, rote work that goes into making a relationship work. The way I see it, just like how having sex whether or not you're, in the moment, enthusiastic about it, is one of the duties of being a good romantic partner, so too is having conversations whether or not you're, in the moment, enthusiastic about it.
07mk
4d ago
Don't go into a relationship trying to change someone
You and your partner need to grow into the right people for each other.
First bullet says don't try change the other person, the second bullet says try to change yourself. A characteristic of someone is their willingness or desire to change in order to help their relationship with you; this is something you shouldn't go into a relationship expecting to change about them. They either will or won't change themselves to help the relationship they have with you, and your efforts to influence that will have minimal effect at best. So find someone who is willing to change for you (rather than someone you find attractive that you believe you can change into the kind of person who would change for you) and change yourself to help your relationship with them. This doesn't seem paradoxical.
07mk
6d ago
it seems people take this too far and think even a trained woman can't beat an untrained man, and I don't see why THAT is true.
As far as I can tell, what it seems to you according to this sentence isn't reflective of the actual reality; it seems to me that people don't take this that far, except the Lizardman Constant. The idea that you could take some random 50th percentile man from the street and have him face off against, say, an MMA world-champion-caliber female and have him consistently come out on top is something I've seen pretty much no one ever express, except in cases of extreme differences in weight (controlling for which is usually already built-in anyway in competitions like this in regular cases). Or comparing deadlifts with a world-champion-caliber female power lifter or anything of the like. The point of comparison when comparing elite female athletes unfavorably to males has always been with male athletes, in my experience, usually ones that are even higher level than, say, a local rec soccer league (which is already a much higher level compared to the median man off the street).
07mk
8d ago
Good news is that in an open market, it really doesn't matter. The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more.
This seems correct and, along with your bullet points above it, indicates that any sort of renewable-focused activism in the past was a complete failure, and in the future would be a complete waste of time. I wish I could hope that those people who were complete failures in the past would learn from this so as not to waste their (and our) time and resources in the future, but I'm not that naive.
07mk
8d ago
The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.
To be fair, you probably would be doing a lot of it too, if you managed to wrangle such an arrangement.
07mk
10d ago
Retard was never quite ubiquitously PC-banned, but there was a lot of spikiness. I grew up in the 90s and 00s in an area with such a spike, such that calling someone a retard or something retarded was probably about equivalent to calling a gay man a faggot. I was quite surprised when I grew up and encountered people in my professional life calling things retarded in the office.
I think it's probably retreated a bit such that it's not considered quite as offensive here anymore, but certainly almost no one ever says it in casual conversation. The last time I heard it in a social situation was a friend's gf who had recently moved into the area, which prompted the friend to stare daggers at her and compel her to shut up.
I've noticed a bit of hubbub in the PC circles due to the distress at this word becoming more common again. Ironically, I feel like this is an example of moral progress: in the 90s, we naively thought that it was morally correct to discourage the use of that word. 30 years later, we've realized that, like slavery or human sacrifice, such a notion was just a primitive belief by a less moral culture that we've outgrown.
This isn't clear to me, though. At the very least, it's not clear to me that policies that would accomplish this would make society better rather than immensely worse. It's not clear to me it would make it immensely worse, either, but I certainly know which way I would bet if it were possible to adjudicate this and pay out.
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