07mk
2d ago
Furthermore, I do not think that the SPLC are actually mustache-twisting villains who want to enable far-right violence to justify their own existence.
I don't think mustache-twirling villains tend to do this, and I think people who tend to do this don't metaphorically twirl mustaches. It seems to me that a common tendency of any activist - to the point that it should be taken as the default presumption unless there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary - is to overestimate one's own importance in the activism and the importance to society of the topic around which one's activism is. As such, believing that keeping one's activist organization well funded and running, no matter what, is something that any activist who genuinely, in good-faith, believes oneself to be doing good, can easily fall into.
07mk
2d ago
I think seeing it as just 2 teams is more simplistic than is warranted here. I see this not as Trump or his ill attacking my side, but rather shooting out a cancer that's been rapidly and successfully killing the healthy parts of my side for decades. It'd be preferable to go to a surgeon who has expertise and incentive to keep the rest of us healthy and alive, but when all the surgeons have decided to join the cult of the cancer that values the cancer itself over the host, that's hard to come by.
07mk
3d ago
They told me that "developmentally disabled" was the proper term, and I'd guess that "disabled" might enter the treadmill at some point in another 3 decades. Maybe when describing an engine that has been made to no longer function, the non-offensive term will be something like "unworking" like how zoomers are using "unalived" for suicide now.
07mk
3d ago
I just want to say, I found your usage of the phrase "mentally handicapped" in context of discussing the offensiveness of "retarded" to describe such people to be funny, because it was about 10 years ago that multiple mental healthcare workers informed me that "handicapped" was now even more offensive than "retarded," because it was a reference to village idiots who would have a cap in their hand to beg for handouts (no idea if there's etymological veracity to this - I'd guess not). The euphemism treadmill is hard enough to stay on top of, but it appears it's not even linear!
07mk
4d ago
The lack of continuous learning seems, to me, one of the biggest weaknesses of LLMs right now, with respect to getting to something that a layman human would recognize as AGI. The one thing I wonder about, though, is that continuous learning is just a speed problem right now. Even if all LLM development were to freeze at this moment, it's a safe bet that, within the next century (and safer-still within the next millennium), we'll have hardware capable of not only running LLMs but also training them at speeds so much faster than now, such that the hours of training using enterprise data servers that went into, say, Mythos, could be done in milliseconds on a cheap phone that someone in the lower-middle class could afford. I'm sure there would be engineering kinks to work out, but I don't see why, once the hardware gets powerful enough, this training couldn't be happening at rates fast enough to be indistinguishable from continuous to a typical human.
And if we do reach that point with LLM software that does this, will it actually be AGI? Will there be bizarre, unexpected and fundamentally impossible-to-predict-right-now issues that arise from such a system? I hope hardware gets fast enough in my lifetime that I can find out.
07mk
7d ago
I'm hopeful, but I'm still skeptical that this past week signifies a true return to norm. I'm not that commenter you referenced, and I also haven't made any money from the Iran war... yet. A little after the war started, I had spent some of my high-risk investment money to get into a Vanguard energy-industry fund, which has mostly been responsive to oil prices, and I've certainly lost money after today, but I also decided to put more into it today, because of my pessimism that the market is a little too caught up in the hype. We'll see.
07mk
8d ago
The exact number determines how many martyrs you can justify, right? 160 would mean that up to 2 freedom fighters could securely murder-suicide themselves, but a third would only get about 22% of what he's owed in the afterlife.
07mk
8d ago
Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy.
The thing is that journalists and others in the media either know that illiteracy of this type is incredibly common among the audience of their articles and even moreso among the audience of their headlines, or they have the intelligence and knowledge required to know. So when there's significant misunderstanding by the audience of stuff like this, it speaks to either malice, malicious ignorance, or incompetence that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from malice.
07mk
8d ago
One thing I've taken to doing to help me use AI in my job (which I do a lot these days, and it's growing) is to use as good an AI as I have access to (Claude Opus right now) how to use an LLM to solve some problem I have, and using that as a guide to use other, cheaper LLMs to accomplish whatever task I have. I couldn't help but notice that your comment is essentially a prompt that i might enter into an AI, just dorected at a bunch of NIs. If I were in your situation, I'd try copying and pasting your entire comment into Claude and then go from there.
07mk
8d ago
IMO woke history revisionism is one of the most damaging trends in modern academia, simply because of how much it is allowed to proliferate uncritically or even treated with any seriousness. It usually manifests in the systematic downplaying (or outright denial) of slavery, human sacrifice and other endemic practices among non white civilisations, and claiming that white men somehow introduced these vices to their otherwise harmonious civilisations.
Yes, but also, this is just a generic problem with anything "woke" in academia, because one of the core tenets of "woke" is the rejection of logic, rationality, and empirical evidence in favor of "other ways of knowing" based on claims by people who belong to favored identity groups, since the former are oppressive inventions of White Supremacy and Patriarchy. As such, there's no limiting factor for claims made by people who are at or close to the top of the oppression totem pole. Academics resolve the cognitive dissonance between this and the fact that academia is fundamentally about applying reason, evidence, and skepticism, by just looking the other way when such claims are made. This applies outside academia, too, of course.
There's also a recurring theme in progressive history circles to claim the Americas would've still evolved to become the modern superpower that it is today had European settlers never arrived on these shores, as if leaving the indigenous peoples entirely undisturbed would have produced equivalent institutional, scientific, and industrial outcomes. Even though historical and even current parameters do not support this claim.
I doubt even they believe this though, but saying it out loud would get them exiled by their ingroup as it would be implying that atrocities (real or perceived) against indigenous Americans was justified as it had led to more productive outcomes.
I'm sure some are performing like this - perhaps more now than ever - but let me assure you, I know for a fact that this is a genuine, sincere belief that has been held by at least one person in this group, and I have near-fact-level confidence that an extremely high proportion of people claiming this also do genuinely, sincerely believe it (to whatever extent anyone can be said to genuinely believe anything, anyway).
07mk
9d ago
With so many women chasing so-called "Chad" it's become very easy for a woman to find a guy who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship. Provided she is willing to overlook the fact that he is short; or balding; or mediocre in facial attractiveness.
In other words, it hasn't gotten any easier for women to find a mate who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship.
07mk
9d ago
men are probably more socialized to not challenge other men on their driving habits
If we're speculating that this isn't just an artifact and that there's a there there, my bias based on personal experience is that this is a factor. The only friends I have that are at all defensive about their driving habits, to the extent that even grabbing the handle when they're driving gets a side-eye, and pointing out anything wrong with their driving could cause a shouting match, are male. As such, I learned to put on an act when driving with such friends. I speculate that it may be a consequence of testosterone and/or the greater societal pressure to be seen as competent at such activities that men have relative to women.
07mk
9d ago
Maybe in the 90s the memeplex around dating was "go grrrl", but today there's plenty of wisdom in the air that men [that they notice first] are not out for the women's best interest. One needs but listen and learn.
Well, listening and learning is hard enough for anyone, but I think there's a catch-22 here that's specific to this situation, in that the people they need to listen and learn from in order to avoid these pitfalls are people that they, almost by definition, don't respect or even notice. I do agree with you that it's entirely the personal responsibility for someone, woman or man, to avoid people who are romantically harmful to themselves, and the negative treatment of women in this context is the responsibility of the women who choose to tolerate or even reward such treatment. But I don't think they can help it any more than men can help being attracted enough to skinny, youthful women that they enable awful behavior from that set.
07mk
9d ago
But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim
This isn't true, though. A common, but not major, "woke" talking point is that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did, often including rather historically questionable claims of inventions or identities, such as the claim that Shakespeare plagiarized from a black woman or that Cleopatra was black. Of course, this is often justified on the basis that this sort of pride is only to make up for the way oppressive society forces them to be shamed merely for existing or whatever, but also of course, the actual explanation doesn't matter. It's just who/whom, based on identities that educated people can convince themselves belong to whatever part of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
True, but sufficiently advanced risk-taking is indistinguishable from suicide.
Interesting, I'd never encountered it written out so well, but this is a concept I ran into (somewhat) recently. I had a friend who committed suicide, which caught every one of his friends and family by surprise. Cliche about how he was always the most lively person in any setting where he was, and how much better he was at socializing and bringing people together than anyone else applies in full here. One of the many things he was known for, though, was being an incredibly reckless (and yet somehow also wreck-less) driver. Almost everyone I met who had been driven by him once (including myself) sweared off ever being driven by him again, for fear of death, and he regularly drove his moped for hours through snowy/rainy/stormy weather day or night, ostensibly just to visit us or other friends. After the fact, some of us in his friend group started wondering if his driving behavior was a form of passive suicide that he was seeking out. He never left a note or confided in anyone who has spoken out (closest we've got is multiple of his ex-girlfriends noting how different and dead he appeared in private after the many social events he would both organize and improve through his presence, but no one ever considered this notable until after the suicide), so we'll never know (and even he might not have been privy to his motivations at the time).
Also interestingly enough, despite owning both firearms and vehicles, his way of going involved engineering a contraption to suffocate himself with helium, something which seemed to have taken some planning and execution over some hours, if not days, for procurement. I imagine there are likely many other people who had similar mindsets who made snap decisions during driving that appeared as accidents rather than suicide.
07mk
10d ago
Perhaps it's just more common for couples to go places with the man driving; that if women were driving it would be men who are stereotypical backseat drivers.
My guess would be that this is responsible for a lot of it, as an artifact of the likely reality (citation needed) that when a man and a woman are traveling together in a car with one of them driving, the majority of the time and distance involve the man driving and, as such, the woman is the one more often in the position to back/side-seat drive. The reason for this phenomena are likely many, including that men are more incentivized to take the lead and responsibility, especially in romantic relationships and that men are more likely to be the richer one and therefore more likely to be the car owner in the case that they're romantic partners. I'd also guess that men are more likely than women not to consider driving to be a burden.
There's also the fact that men tend to have higher risk tolerance, and so driving behavior that he considers reasonable could be considered dangerous by her more often than the other way around.
If there's any particular real difference in behavior, I'd guess that it's because women are incentivized by society to direct men to solve their problems in a way that men aren't incentivized to direct women - or other men - to solve theirs. But I don't know how much is left over to explain after my first 2 paragraphs above.
07mk
10d ago
I was going to say that your question doesn't seem small scale, but then I realized that it's actually the most literally small scale question that has been asked here.
07mk
11d ago
This is my default explanation for anything that Trump does. The last decade has proven to me that he's unthinking and uncaring at the best of times, and the last 2 years has made me believe that he's entered a stage in his life that aren't the best times. Also, I think that the conclusion that he's a narcissist with a god complex is pretty easy to reach independent of this, and trying to claim that this post adds meaningful evidence of this seems rather silly. I'm reminded of around mid-late 2024, when some media outlet presented the argument that Trump was fascist/Nazi/Hitler-like (I don't recall exactly which), and a bunch of people were breathlessly pointing at the argument as some novel point that should convince former Trump voters, as if calling him giga-Hitler hadn't just been SOP for his loudest opponents continually since 2015.
No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times
Why not? People get lung cancer without ever smoking as well. There very well could be some non-smokers whose lung cells were, just due to dumb luck and coincidence, 1 inhale away from becoming cancerous, and 1 puff triggered it. Probably not many, though.
Which, I think, gets at the issue that this argument is about quantity, not quality. Is sex -> pregnancy more like driving or smoking, where you could reasonably do it tens of thousands of times and still not get the consequence, or is it more like playing Russian Roulette with 6 bullets, where your odds of surviving is the odds of the bullet or gun being defective plus of your aim being off enough either to miss or cause non-fatal damage (actually 1-(1-(odds))*(1-odds)), I think, but that's a good-enough approximation), and by how much? I think most people place the line somewhere in between for determining the morality of elective abortion, and it's the different places where people put that line that cause conflict. Especially since many of those people don't even seem to recognize that they're placing such a line, much less where that line is for themselves.
07mk
11d ago
In your own example, we don't deny care or deny the attempt to fix lung cancer from smokers.
We do, at the margins, because we make smokers pay higher health insurance premiums, which reduces their access to care that would fix lung cancer. Similar is the case for car accidents as well, since a track record of reckless driving increases auto insurance premiums, which reduces one's access to mitigate the consequences of auto accidents one gets into.
Given that pregnancy and abortion are more all-or-none things rather than near-continuous like insurance premiums and payouts, I think the analogy breaks down here, though.
07mk
11d ago
That seems a bit defeatist. I am not saying people shouldn't be allowed vastly more wealth than me, or to retire early. Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society. I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.
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.
07mk
11d 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
12d 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.
I think "reigned in" might have reached status of being a correct version of the phrase due to popular use, with an invented-etymological explanation being that it's like a king ordering someone to pull back. It's like how "could" now means the same thing as "couldn't" when part of the phrase "could care less," due to how people have been confusing the terms (or rather, it seems that people have made up the explanation that "could care less" is a reference to the fact that they care so little that it's less than anyone or anything - they "could care less [than some arbitrary X, and they do indeed do what they could]"). Or like how "literally" now means "emphatically" or "severely" in some contexts.
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