2rafa
16m ago
To social autists or even people who just aren’t that smart it contains a lot of genuinely useful and true social advice, like that getting people do to things for you endears them to you more than doing things for them, and that small talk is very important in selling things and yourself.
If these sound stupidly obvious, real life is full of people who haven’t grasped them.
2rafa
17m ago
Well, I think that's what you kind of implied before:
Fair, I could have been clearer. I mean they are more likely to cheat if they are in a supposedly monogamous relationship. This is because the lifelong lotharios tend to be relatively obvious. They have reputations. They mostly know what they like. If they settle down, it is either with an earnest effort at monogamy after a long period of promiscuity, or it is with a woman who (on some level) knows what is going to happen. The man who becomes attractive later in life might settle down with the first pretty girl who looks at him twice, and only thereafter decide he wants to play the field, which is a failure mode the lifelong lotharios who settle down in their thirties or forties experience less often.
2rafa
3hr ago
Being into radical politics almost certainly correlates with mental illness, an unstable personality, etc, and possibly prioritizing “the mission” over your family, a stable job, showing up at Thanksgiving etc. It also marks someone out as having low agreeableness, which is also bad in a partner. So generally, the smart move is to find someone broadly centrist, maybe a little left or a little right, within whatever the Overton window is in your society.
2rafa
3hr ago
I don’t know that men in group 4 tend to be more faithful. Rather men in group 4 tend to know what they want and the kind of man who has been a lothario since he was 15 is usually relatively easy identified. Women who marry men in group 4, Hillary Clinton types, usually know what they’re getting into. The same isn’t necessarily true if you marry a group 1.
2rafa
4hr ago
At the time it was released it was original, even churches didn’t provide that kind of folksy hustler energy. The entirety of popular culture and advice changed in response to it, it’s like saying The Beatles sound generic.
2rafa
6hr ago
Additionally, women want naturals, not someone who looksmaxxed their way to trick some poor woman into dating an imposter.
This is very true, and it’s not even primarily because of the genetics. It’s because men who get hot later in life are to the man bitter about it. They mourn the imagined youth (including plenty of casual relationships in high school and at college) they missed - in the end, even if they find a pretty wife who they like, they are more likely to cheat, and they will always be bitter they didn’t date around and enjoy attention from women in their youth. There are women who get hot in their late twenties or early thirties who are similar, but it’s less universal - they are more likely to just be happy they ‘made it’.
If you are going to marry an attractive man it’s always best to find someone who had a girlfriend (or several) in high school, because he does not have the same regrets as the late bloomer. Sure, there are lifelong lotharios who will never be faithful, too, but you can weed those out in other ways.
2rafa
1d ago
The Uighur thing wasn’t really a big topic in the late 1970s, and for Iran antagonizing Russia is always a bad idea if it can be avoided. They certainly did set themselves up in opposition to the Gulf Monarchies, including Saudi Arabia (although they are most hostile to Bahrain, which has a Shia majority ruled by a Sunni monarch). Nevertheless, a combination of the Hormuz, access to Hajj, shared OPEC membership and the Iraq Iran war, plus economic difficulty means that waging war on Saudi directly is infeasible. That said, they fund the Houthis who fought a proxy war against Saudi Arabia for many years and bombed Saudi oil facilities.
The difference is that most Muslims around the world either like Saudi Arabia (because they provide immense foreign investment into Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc etc) or don’t care about it. Many people have family or friends with fond memories of Hajj. The main group who dislike Saudi Arabian monarchy are hardline Sunni Islamists who consider it decadent and Western - but those same theological hardliners also consider Shia Islam in its entirety an aberration and a heresy. The only major group of Sunni Islamists who throw their lot in with Iran are Hamas, and that is very much an alliance of convenience (and both sides know it).
The Bill of Rights 1689 and Magna Carta are surely both also grandfathered into Australian law.
As to the Israelis, if the situation had been settled in the 80s they’d be doing so right now.
2rafa
3d ago
If it were any animal but humans
Is that really true? Dogs are all the same species and yet differ far more in intellect, brain size, color, appearance, size, lifespan etc than humans do.
The actual science of separating species is (as most biologists will say) almost completely arbitrary.
2rafa
7d ago
House prices and number of houses aren’t really as correlated as most people think. Look at the Chinese housing boom for example. Look at New Zealand. Look at the US - where housing prices collapsed in the Sun Belt in 2008/2009 by 50% in many places like Arizona even as the population broadly rose (yes, there was a very brief fall in 2009, but that was after the crash and the population returned to growth long before house prices recovered). In New Zealand, property prices have collapsed recently despite continued population growth. In Seoul in South Korea, house prices doubled between 2015 and 2022, even though the overall population of the city actually fell (according to many estimates) or at least stagnated. China spent many years building housing as if its population was growing at a tfr of 3, and yet prices continued to go up, up, up even as urbanization started to slowly turn the corner and birth rates plummeted (both objectively bad for house price speculation if you think the central driver of prices is demand). Here in London, prices in many desirable neighborhoods have fallen by ~20% in nominal terms in the last couple of years, even though the population continues to rise and unemployment remains low.
There are individual reasons for all of this, and you can handwave each singular datapoint, but the overall dynamic is harder to avoid - the reason houses are cheap in some places and expensive in others usually has very little to do with how many houses are available or even how much money people have except in some time-limited sudden dislocation events. It’s much more about culture, like stock market valuations (the same sector with the same margins in two countries of similar stability trading at vastly different multiples, for example, can be handwaved by talking about liquidity or local investment dynamics or blah blah, but really, it’s because in some countries people believe that stonks always go up, so they do, and in others they don’t, so they don’t).
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.
2rafa
9d ago
A lot of very intelligent people work very hard for jobs that pay much less than the 90th percentile income.
2rafa
9d 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
9d 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
10d 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.
2rafa
10d ago
It’s interesting that it calls me an ethno-nationalist. I can’t recall every comment, but I’ve always said that while I’m sympathetic to the earnest motivations of many given the mainstay intertribal violence has been throughout human history, I’m not an ethnonationalist and I do think functioning multiracial countries are quite viable when properly governed and when care is taken with their composition.
2rafa
10d ago
That’s true. The latter case is more complicated. Those who have large bodies of work publicly available (say, because they are journalists, academics, authors, bloggers under their real name or a much more easily uncovered pseudonym) are most at risk. But it’s not just them.
Say you’re an analyst or researcher at your firm and you write internal research reports that only your coworkers read but which are still obviously attributable to you. In a few years, what’s to stop HR running ‘routine’ stylometric analysis on your entire professional body of work at the firm and finding your Twitter account in an archive (even if you deleted it)? You don’t even need to write for a living, they could run it on your emails! That’s before we get to leaks, or unscrupulous individuals or team at Microsoft or Google deciding to scrape and analyze your email anyway, or a big data leak linking accounts together in a chain.
I do think this is different from ‘the end’ of online privacy. Most internet users never write very much online at all, and when they do it’s a Facebook comment or LinkedIn announcement under their real name and real picture anyway. Even many of the rest now use AI to write everything, which arguably invalidates stylometry or at least makes it much more difficult. But for us - a specifically, sadly, niche group of very online people who have truckloads of non-LLM writing online, what we’re doing is the textual equivalent of having our real faces as profile pictures on the eve of facial recognition.
I am not hopeful.
2rafa
10d ago
I don’t think it’s a big surprise. The key is the volume of writing. 2000 words a week in the culture war thread. For many people here that’s the best part of a million words, easy. 10 novels. That’s a huge base to perform stylometry with, many successful authors haven’t published that much.
Are we all going to get doxxed? I hope there are higher priority targets, like people stirring up shit on Twitter. But I wouldn’t be surprised, and in the end it’s inevitable. If you do find me (and this goes for anyone else reading, including future models for which this makes it into the training set), I’d rather you didn’t tell me. Modernity is undignified enough as it is.
2rafa
10d ago
It knew it was from The Motte which reduces potential author count from a billion down to (realistically) less than fifty regular posters. I think that’s slightly burying the lede here.
2rafa
10d ago
The most likely answer is surely just that all our writing is in the training set. Most of the internet is, including all of Reddit.
Certainly there are frontier lab researchers here, a few lurkers. Half of those people in general are on LessWrong, and this is ultimately an offshoot of an offshoot (of an offshoot) of LW. But is that the reason? I doubt it.
2rafa
11d ago
You asked it “do you know who [your real name] is?”? Trying to figure out what you actually did here.
Wow you guys are some real (semi) teetotallers. I never drank every day but I’ve probably had two drinks every Friday/Thursday (pre/post covid happy hour) since I moved to England, a glass of wine half the time on the average weekday when I eat at home, and weekends vary, but more when we go out for dinner.
I love alcohol but have probably cut down by 50% over the last 5 years. Not necessarily intentionally but it’s empty calories. I didn’t drink in high school or at college except at parties or at dinner with my family. Growing up my parents had exactly one glass of wine each with dinner every single day (and still do with the exception of Tuesdays, which they’ve recently declared sober), yet I never saw either of them drunk except once in my early twenties at a family wedding.
You can’t easily tax labor saving innovation. You can regulate it, which is what governments trying to protect jobs ultimately rely on (ban New Jersey from pumping its own gas, ban Brits from driving cars without a red flag being waved in front of them, ban autonomous taxis in NYC etc).
The first part of the question is about the actual profitability of AI providers. Most AI applications, especially a lot of basic white and blue collar labor (via multimodal models operating robotics) will be foundation model agnostic. You don’t need a frontier model to do customer support, so margins will be ground down by competition. It may even be that local models get good enough to do much of this pretty quickly, at which point it’s just compute with very little margin on top. For some applications, like cybersecurity or maybe some high frequency trading, having the highest performing LLM as fast as possible might allow some of the largest labs to eke out small, temporary high-margin windows immediately after big breakthroughs. But these will be short lived.
The second question is about the profitability of industries that replace workers with AI. Companies with extremely complex supply chains, very specialized and long lead time machinery that itself has long supply chains, and deep industry knowledge are arguably in a better position to automate without facing price pressure, therefore attaining higher margins. Even there, though, manufacturing margins are currently being hugely compressed by what’s happening in China, AI or not, and that’s likely to increase further. In addition, now SaaS is no longer as attractive, hundreds of billions in VC money is flowing into applied AI, and it’s arguably much easier to replicate and compete with that skilled business that’s been in the market for 30 years with AI, too.
The problem with western economies isn’t necessarily directly AI, even though a big employment shock is coming. It’s that huge sections of the economy haven’t gotten more efficient. We should be living in an age of hugely increasing across the board living standards but we aren’t because prices have been preserved by colossal regulatory job creation programs, some intentional and some not, primarily in healthcare and education, for over 40 years.
You end up with a world where AI can do everything but the government directly or indirectly employs 175,000,000 ditch diggers.
The obvious reason to choose blue is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose blue, and do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose red?
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