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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
Given the ongoing genocide of nearly 80 years, it seems pretty reasonable that the Palestinians would not want (...), too...?
You are trying to frame the two situations as fundamentally different, but it seems that your view of the difference boils down to whether you think the respective death-wishers are the "good guys". It's convenient for you that your current opinion of good and evil aligns with that of the US government, but the whole point of my hypothetical was, what if the US government's position changes?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
Well, the Ukrainians get pretty close to that wrt Russia ("Muscovites onto the gallows" was a popular slogan even before the war). Does that mean that if Trump goes full rapprochement with Putin, pro-Ukrainians would be up for denaturalization?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18d ago
Have you actually encountered these women who approach relationships by being boss bitches with unchecked neuroticism yourself, or are you reciting a culture war catechism or something you have seen others claim on the internet? I have been through and seen plenty of failure modes of relationships, but nothing like "the woman refuses to be nice, warm, loving or create a positive atmosphere for the sake of political LARPing" has been among them.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
· Edited 21d ago
In an alternate history of nuclear-armed Ukraine, I believe Putin will choose a different country to invade instead
...which one? Do you figure there is some priority list of countries he wants to invade? What does it look like?
In our history, Ukraine is always a somewhat Russian friendly country before Russia fucked them hard by all the means after 2000, would Russia fuck with the government of a nuclear-armed, Russian friendly Ukraine?
The Russian view there is quite different - as they contend, at some point after the early 2000s, Ukraine started responding to its economic malaise by stealing gas meant for transit to EU customers to help itself meet its own demand, with some complicity from EU states who refused to hold Ukraine responsible for this diplomatically while also working to sabotage any projects for new pipelines that would bypass Ukraine completely (in EU propaganda, this was framed as the bypass pipelines "enabling Russia to blackmail Ukraine" - as in, blackmail it with the threat of taking away the free gas). If a nuclear-armed Ukraine becomes a pariah in your scenario, is the dominant consequence that its economy is in even more shambles (so it needs to steal more gas) or that the EU objections to bypass pipelines disappear (so it never gets the opportunity to steal as much gas)?
A scenario in which Russia still depends on them for transit but now they are even more desperate to extract unnegotiated concessions for it may not be one in which Russia sees it as friendly. Certainly, my memory is that even in reality, the gas siphoning resulted in a lot of grassroots resentment towards Ukraine among Russians at the time, to the point that they could have easily been persuaded to endorse some punitive aggression against it by a thus inclined statesman.
(I find it interesting that the gas transit story is never mentioned in mainstream reporting on the war, not even with a framing that puts all the blame on Russia. Through my conspiracy goggles, this looks like another instance of a general pattern of producing simple good/evil narratives by cutting off history at a convenient point - in the media, the Israel/Palestine war started on 24-10-07, Russia/Ukraine started in 2014 with a little exemption for the Budapest Memorandum in murky prehistory, and everyone/Iran started with the Islamic Revolution. No hard questions about who shot first. Not that this is new - America/Japan, they claim, started with Pearl Harbor, too.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23d ago
I would find that quite interesting if true - both because I'm in the affected demographic, and because I consider MPB as one of the main pending milestone cases for radical medical life extension. In many ways it's an ideal baby version of the problem: age-related, highly prevalent, great market potential, no stigma around research, external, easily measurable objective success metric with quick feedback, doesn't directly involve any critical organs. It's quite likely that age-related organ failure involves a lot of metaphorical "hair", so as long as we couldn't figure out how to stop and reverse age degrading actual hair, I figure there is no chance that we could do this to the "hair" that might be some ion channels on the pancreas that we only have a tentative understanding of.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Were you into horses, or have you ever empathised with girls who were? The sentiments always struck me as similar, and seemed to be at least slightly correlated.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Well then, don't mind if I henceforth associate you with the "Nice here, but have you been to Baden-Württemberg yet" stickers that I've been seeing on things ranging from Italian statues to Japanese vending machines instead ;)
(Honestly, it's a brilliant ad campaign that I'd never have expected a German institution would come up with. I've caught myself idly fantasizing like "this would be a great place to put one of those stickers" looking at inappropriate landmarks like concentration camps, public toilets and industrial ruins, which is quite the feat in terms of living rent-free in my head)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
higher rates of Palestinian-related content but lower rates of Uyghur-related content versus similar social media apps, among others
Is there evidence that this is not because US-based social media actively suppresses pro-Palestinian content? As for the Uyghur content, that topic has always been minuscule (and felt thoroughly astroturfed during its moment in the limelight) so who knows what is going on there. Maybe the approximately two people still making Uyghur content avoid TikTok because it is Chinese all by themselves.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.
Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.
Poetry, nowadays, appears to be dominated by harpies writing free-form word vomit about their lived experience as a 1/16 Native American, and being very good at coordinating meanness towards anyone who suggests their poems may be trash or precious limited space in anthologies and events should be allocated to someone who is not of their tribe. If rhyme and meter still were table stakes for poetry, they would not be able to occupy the positions of power and taste-making that they do, because ability in rhyming and ability in coordinating meanness are not very correlated (and might even be anticorrelated because both take time to hone). I assume similar things are going on in art, though there whatever social games the monochromatic-canvas crowd engages in are less obviously entangled with SJ.
Picasso actually could draw when he had to, and therefore unsurprisingly was a good artist even when he drew weird cubist stuff. The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18d ago
In what way is a beehive "male-created"?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
My understanding is that some amount of actual stealing took place and was admitted to early on (the 2005 end of the dispute), and after that it was mostly arcane contractual disputes which can best be approximated by something like: Russia was selling gas to Ukraine at well-below-market/charity rates while it was a puppet state, but wanted to start charging market after they had the revolution to bring in the pro-Western guy, which Ukraine couldn't afford (and they might already have been in arrears from before), and so UA decided to basically hold westward transit hostage to demand continued sub-market deliveries (and may either have stolen gas from transit attempts, or asserted a contractual right to take it; hard to find objective information); while the Western states, having alternatives and not liking the idea that Ukraine would be incentivised with cheap gas to not be pro-Western, approved of this process.
EU also didn't find any proof that the gas was stolen IIRC.
This means as little in the context as if Russia found "proof", since the EU wanted to back their own puppet. If we wanted objective information, perhaps we should have put an Indian investigative team on the case as they did in the Korean war...
True. But if you do your diligence, you'll find that we (Russians) were rarely good guys.
Eh. My reading is that at least in several of the post-'90s conflicts, their moral batting average was pretty average. I do think it was evil on the strategic level that they essentially wanted to keep Ukraine perpetually poor and dependent, though the exact ways in which they did it seem more business-as-usual to me; on the other hand, e.g. in Georgia 2008, I think they were morally in the right (Georgia shot first, and I don't see their moral claim to the separatist areas). Chechnya, and the quite possibly false-flag apartment bombings - evil, for sure (though I think the Chechens were/are also a nasty bunch, so it was black-on-dark-grey warfare like the US invasion of Afghanistan). In the case of Transnistria, I also don't see Moldova's moral claim.
More importantly, though, I think it doesn't matter because orthogonally to interior politics, the post-WWII US (and friends) is more evil than Russia. (I mean, just in this year, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has in Ukraine for the whole duration of the war!) I'd rather have zero tyrants on the world stage than one, but if we have to have at least one, I'd rather have 2+, so they at least have to throw some morsels to us in the NPC countries occasionally lest we all align with the respective other. When I argue against the morality of the US camp, it's strictly in the service of the implications of this viewpoint: a world in which every credible challenger to the US has been neutered is worse than the one we currently inhabit.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Eh. That's a statement that would not be so easy to prove - examples of the sort of slippery slopes that are enabled by encouraging the sharing of such "human reactions", and what sort of communities form at their bottom, abound (as the advantage gained by exhibiting the "reactions" is so strong that nobody is going to leave that $5 on the ground in the long run), while if discouraging it is in fact a bad thing, this badness must be rather subtle.
I didn't suggest that it's a "nuclear bomb" in the sense of one instance of it being immediately massively destructive (though it certainly can be; in the phpBB era, I have once seen a fairly major community ripped apart by what was, impressively enough, one sharing of such a "human reaction" by a guy's sockpuppet account LARPing as a Japanese half-sister (a critical mass of people including staff really wanted to believe).)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18d ago
Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
25d ago
Is there a difference between this level of "not taking [the principle] literally", and it just not being the real principle? If you can "misread" international law as "the US and those in good standing with it should be the arbiters of what is permissible between nations", then you can also misread "do not kill humans even if they are of negative age" as "women should be raising children, not fucking around", and in both cases I would say it's not so much that you don't believe anything, as that you believe the latter but realise that touting that principle is a bad look/likely to decrease support for you.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
26d ago
· Edited 26d ago
More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong.
I mean, I know - I'm one of them! The case you describe still does sound morally wrong to me, in the same way in which drugging your daughter and submitting her to a cosmetic surgery would be. This is still not "women can do no wrong" - it's interesting how culture warriors on both sides refuse to believe that the other side could actually disagree with them on the moral status of fetuses, and think it must actually all be about women (blue: "red just wants to punish women for recreational sex" - red: "blue thinks women can do no wrong").
(Not that I'm not guilty of this myself - it is still genuinely different for me to believe in my heart that right-wingers really think fetuses are people being murdered, and it's not just a case of the real principle being rationalised by a loftier one like when people always remember international law when their enemies break it. It's hard when many of the same people are arguing a few threads down that women having sex with no prospect of marriage or childbirth is the root of all of our problems.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
I'm not familiar enough with the US anymore to know if what you say about reds (not) wielding injunctions is accurate, but one could imagine the theoretical possibility playing a role even if reds never did it, if, for example, we posit that blues had a more accurate picture of what the different jurisdictions could do and therefore avoided taking executive steps they know would be stopped by injunction.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
I always thought of it as a corollary of motte-and-bailey (arranged something like that old "their barbarous wastes" two-castle picture) - [I get to keep] my bailey > my motte > the opponent[ gets to keep hi]s motte > the opponent's bailey.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
25d ago
US/Israel/Iran/Russia.
It seems quite conspicuous how on one hand US engagement with the Israel/Iran war, widely seen as something that is very personal for Trump for whatever reason, coincides with a much-lamented acceleration of the softening of his stance on Russia; and on the other hand Russia is also conspicuously sitting on the fence regarding the conflict, despite their previous military collaboration with Iran and it being ostensibly natural for them to take this opportunity to set another trap for the Western coalition.
Do you figure it could be the case that Trump decided to buy Putin's neutrality on the matter by offering him at least a period of US stonewalling on further pro-Ukraine action? The null hypothesis I can think of is that Putin just independently appreciates that Israel has been reticent to support Ukraine directly so far, while Trump's rapprochement with Russia is just a natural continuation of his preexisting trajectory and not particularly connected to Iran.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
26d ago
In my eyes, the international law thing I mentioned feels like blatant belief substitution (I don't think "rationalisation" is quite the right term for the postulated mechanism, where a low-status value is replaced by a higher-status subgoal that serves it) due to how self-serving and selective it is - but it seems to be believed by absolute majorities in countries like Germany without even having a well-defined proximate outgroup rejecting it. Why would it not be plausible that pro-lifers, who are less of a majority and are in a mutual chokehold against an outgroup rejecting this premise, could do the same thing? (Though to begin with, it's not really well-defined where the boundary between rationalising and normal belief formation even lies.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
28d ago
In general yes, and with the Saudis in particular I actually think they are long overdue for a drubbing on very similar grounds to Israel. (Since Saudi Arabia is not even remotely democratic, though, I think the moral case that its civilians deserve it is far weaker!) That being said, I think of the obligation to be a "good citizen" among the nations to only really come into full force after a certain threshold of national capability is surpassed - tasers and rubber bullets are appropriate for antisocial adults running wild, not antisocial children throwing a temper tantrum, with the latter being more appropriately subjected to gentler and more patronising modes of reeducation. If some random minnow on the order of Syria is impotently mouthing off against its neighbours, what they need is a stern talking-to and maybe a review if at some point it looks like they might be acquiring the capacity to making good on those threats.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
26d ago
In what way is this integrity? If this is actually what is going on, it's more like motte ("abortion is murder, I want to stop murder") and bailey ("nothing to force hoes to become housewives like saddling them with a baby").
Well, to shift the frame a bit, does it matter? Of the people who read an article titled "Will an Egg a Day Keep the Doctor Away, or Will It Simply Raise Your Cholesterol?", how many do care about whether its contents are factual and well-sourced*, and how many just want the qualia of reading an article about something to while away their time on the mortal coil? Depending on what the product of human writers that the market actually demands is, yours might just be yet another case of writing off cars for being inadequate horses.
*and does it even make a difference if the source chain just bottoms out in some garbage p-hacked nutrition paper that will be forgotten in five years when some slop research lab decides to p-hack up a new paper on the topic? What fraction of writing anywhere is about something more than the qualia of writing and reading something like the thing it pretends to be? Perhaps straight up making up citations is just cutting out some layers of indirection in the con.
tl;dr: Rather than being more bullish on AI, I think you ought to be more bearish on humanity.
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