2rafa
2hr ago
A lot of very intelligent people work very hard for jobs that pay much less than the 90th percentile income.
2rafa
5hr ago
Large age gaps are rare and have always been rare. The reason they draw disproportionate attention is because they serve as a way to psychologize one’s opponents in the battle of the sexes. We might say similar things about concepts like “the wall”, the debate on catcalling, so-called “chadfishing”, the “body count” debate and so on. All of these relate to similar neuroses. So let us psychologize, then.
The “age gaps are nothing bad wink” imagines his opponents as middle aged harpies. Sad about their declining looks, he imagines they are very upset at seeing men their age date much younger women, and so they lash out. Forget the fact that most of these women are married to men (broadly) their age, and that most middle aged men are married to middle aged women, and that he himself is likely either with a woman close to his age or, if he is single, is unlikely to be dating a far younger woman statistically. It is the idea that matters. It is more of a taunt than anything.
Similarly, the “age gaps are bad” /r/fauxmoi regular embarrassingly invested in the romantic lives of various celebrities is also posturing. Not to the opposite sex, though, but to the same one. Consider the line “I was catcalled every day from the age of 12 to 20. Men are pigs, they want the youngest possible girl who doesn’t yet know how to recognize their bullshit - don’t make my mistake”, which one sees variants of in every one of these discussions in women’s communities. What is this line saying? It’s saying “I was once an extremely beautiful young woman. I had great currency, and you should listen to me”. It is no less an invocation of one’s own attractiveness as status as hitting on your uglier friend’s boyfriend in front of her. Men do this too - the ex-playboy telling young men that casual sex isn’t all it’s set up to be while still emphasizing just how much of it he had, for example. There are the rich people who will tell you money isn’t everything. The beautiful people who tell you looks aren’t everything. Many of the people saying these things aren’t even rich or beautiful.
And none of them, really, are wrong. There are elements of truth to every one of these narratives. But they’re all motivated. In the end, these people go back to their average wives and average husbands and find, I hope, some average happiness. The gender debate rolls on.
2rafa
5hr ago
LLMs being described as having ‘memory’ of things in the training set is almost certainly far closer to the colloquial, human understanding of what ‘memory’ is than either of the above concepts are to computer memory or an encyclopedia.
So if someone colloquially says the LLM has its training set in its memory this is no less accurate than saying that you remember what the water cycle is even though you cannot recall the precise page and content and diagram of the school textbook that you learned it from. Or why you can identify a line of text written in ‘Trump voice’ even though you cannot exhaustively list every Trump tweet you’ve ever seen.
2rafa
23hr ago
Iran didn’t greenlight October 7, they appear very much to have been surprised by it was the intelligence assessment. Iran was and is much closer to Hezbollah than Hamas, Hamas are Sunni, were on the other side in the Syrian Civil War, etc. It’s more of an enemy of my enemy thing with them.
Doctors are one of the only high status, high income, high volume jobs.
This is actually a great way to think about this wider issue. There are high status (meaning respect as a profession) and high volume jobs - like nurses and architects, but the pay is usually decent or below. There are high pay and marginally higher volume jobs - like some computer programmers, oil rig workers, successful salespeople - but they tend to have medium or lower social status (both prestige and occupational respect). And there are high status, high(ish) pay jobs (senior judge, Hollywood A/B lister, senator), but they’re very low volume. How many astronauts are there? (Apparently the most ‘prestigious’ profession). 50?
There are a million doctors in America. Doctors have very high social status / occupational prestige. Doctors have excellent job security and high pay. This unique combination exists for no other profession.
Sure, there are people who make more than doctors, like investment bankers, quant traders, senior executives at major corporations, but they are arguably widely reviled and in any case there aren’t many of them. And sure, there are the astronauts and noble prize winning scientists, but they almost all get paid less than doctors (according to Reddit the recent lunar astronauts probably make $150k a year). There are more ‘fun’ jobs like artists and creatives, but again, the trade off is that you’ll be poor unless you’re 99.9th percentile. There are schoolteachers, who also have relatively high social respect and good job security, but they make far less than doctors unless they’re in a top-10 paying nationwide school district (in which case the local doctors make much more too) and they’re still lower status than being a doctor.
The question is ‘are all three levers necessary here’? STEM adjuncts (who are often very smart) work for shitty pay and there are still tens of thousands more PhDs produced every year. In countries where doctors are paid much less (including relative to average salaries), medical school is still very competitive - suggesting that status (or more charitably healing the sick) is enough of a motivation, you don’t need to add ‘getting (moderately) rich’. Lastly, there are so many doctors relative to other very high pay professions that they cannot all or mostly or even to a large extent find other jobs - and since nowhere pays doctors more than America, they can’t emigrate either.
This suggests doctor pay can be reduced in the United States without major risks.
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