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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
24d ago
I don't think I noticed that, somehow. What sort of "pedo stuff" are we talking about, on the spectrum from toddler rape to the American "that bikini pic? She was 17 years and 364 days old, you monster"?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
28d ago
It is a strain to compare a large protest which involves people obstructing and assaulting law enforcement to a large protest which involves people breaking into the country's main legislative building. Whatever you think about the severity of either, they are firstly surely quite different in nature, and secondly the former is quite common across Western countries while the latter is very rare.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
Fine, replace "conservatives" with "everyone who is not declaring allegiance to Team Trans". It really doesn't seem important to the hypothetical what the exact boundaries of C are - I'm just positing, as a counterexample to what seems to be @Primaprimaprima's argument, a contrived scenario in which the conjunction of things he needs to be impossible is actually true, namely that trans women exist in just the same way as they do in reality, progressives are a sort of perceptual mutant set that really can't distinguish trans women from cis women at all, and yet there is a trans movement similar to the one we are in fact seeing.
There are in fact real examples of what seems to be discrimination over nothing at all, and opposition to that discrimination by people who do not have any understanding of the discriminated-against set except by way of "they are the ones that are inexplicably targeted for discrimination"; and I don't think the Cagot truther would have an argument in saying that the people fighting against anti-Cagot discrimination must actually have a model of a real non-Cagot good Frenchman, because they need to be able to distinguish the real humans (non-Cagots) from animals that simply desire to be humans (Cagots), or that "if non-Cagots and Cagots were identical you'd imagine they would at least be accidentally on the side of non-Cagots a few times". Note that I am on some level agnostic about whether Cagot discriminators have a point; for all I know, the Wikipedia article could be progressive propaganda and they might actually be a lineage of evil sociopaths that would put all of European racists' usual boogeymen to shame. I still default to being for equal rights for Cagots, and I have no more of an understanding of what sets them apart than the wiki!
Of course, you could say that yes, the hypothetical progressives and real Cagot rights campaigners actually do have a clear sense (in extension) of who are the Cagots/transwomen, even if in intension their sense is different - the anti-trans team thinks transwomen are definitionally men who claim to be women, and the pro-trans team thinks that transwomen are definitionally women that the anti-trans team claims are not women. The resulting consensus definition winds up being exactly the same, even though I don't think this is what @Primaprimaprima would consider an "accurate model of reality".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
28d ago
I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.
In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".
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1mo ago
Sweden did do a soft lockdown in the sense that businesses had reduced hours/density or encouraged people to work from home, and restricted the occupancy of certain public facilities like swimming pools. That, and I got the subjective sense that they have much less of a contingent of people who are young and severely unhealthy even compared to countries like Germany.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d 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").
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27d ago
· Edited 27d ago
This was a genuinely gripping read, and I am once again updating my understanding of the SOTA upwards. That being said, I can't see a bunch of humanities-aligned Oxford dons being too impressed with it on its own merits - the rhetorical bombast feels a bit too on the nose, like prose written by a strong student who on some level is still marvelling at himself for being able to write so well and can't quite hide being proud about it. This impression is amplified by the occasional malapropism* (ex.: the use of "profound" in the second paragraph) which seems to be a problem that LLMs still struggle with whenever trying to write in a high register (probably because the training corpus is awash with it, and neither the operators nor their best RLHF cattle actually have the uniformly high level of language skill that would be necessary to beat the tendency out of them with consistency).
Do you know how Gemini generated the essay exactly? Is it actually still a single straight-line forward pass as it was when chat assistants first became a thing (this would put it deeper in the "scary alien intelligence" class), or does it perform some CoT/planning, possibly hidden?
*In self-demonstrating irony, "malapropism" is not quite the right word for this, but I can't think of a word that fits exactly! Rather than actually taking into account what exactly, in this context, wishing for the advisor to become foolish is more of than wishing for the advisee to drop dead, it feels like just picking, from among all vaguely positive choices of A in "not X, but something more A", the one that is most common (even if it happens to just denote the nonsensical "deep").
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
28d ago
Compare to a hypothetical progressive definition of women:
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if they look unambiguously female
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if they look ambiguously progressive, claim to be a woman and at least one woman agrees they are a woman (recursively)
Of course you might be tempted to argue that parentage is somehow more solid as an axis of identity conveyance than being part of the same society, but this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23d ago
Unless you really do sign up to the deontological "the bad thing is people getting off to CP", I don't see how this even sketches a slippery slope that actually ends up somewhere bad. How do we get from "CP is decriminalised, but actual sexual acts with children are as illegal as they always were" to any greater prevalence of the latter? You have to contend with at least one great counterexample, which is that simultaneously with depictions of graphic violence (and even compelling simulations of engaging in it) becoming ever better and more widely available, actual violence is on the decline.
Gay marriage fell so fast because the underlying moral taboo (on gay sex) had collapsed many decades prior, following the collapse of either moral framework it could be derived from (Christianity, dominant masculinity). The condemnation of sex with children rests on a different framework (rejection of children's moral and contractual autonomy), which I don't see as declining at all - in fact, if anything, with rampant safetyism, trigger warnings and coddled college students, the principle that some are too young and innocent to manage their own affairs is ascendant.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
29d ago
· Edited 29d ago
I expect any breakthroughs in the physical domain to lag significantly - customer service, contracts, sales and coding will be automated, but no self-driving cars and humanoid robots*, and the humans that were formerly in those jobs will be pushed into somewhat less cushy replacements that make use of their skills but also involve some hard-to-automate real-world component - assembling and maintaining bespoke machinery, driving cars, installing cabling, etc. There is a certain possibility that this correlates closely with the jobs that have already been bullshittified, to an extent that the metrics of success in them are now also bullshit - ChatGPT may be a 100x more productive legal brief writer than the human it replaces, but more and better legal briefs could amount to somewhere between a little more and infinitely less productivity. Meanwhile, the humans freed up by this to do more productive work like driving deliveries may not actually be that great at those jobs, so you get something between a slight improvement and a net negative change to baseline productivity while also having to contend with an overall productivity tax from social upheaval (as large strata of the population curb their consumption due to uncertainty or personal socioeconomic drop).
* Always seemed obvious to me once you take away human conceit. In the former domain, you are fighting to outperform maybe 40000 years of evolution; in the latter, some tens or hundreds of millions.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
You seem to be accepting the predominantly American framing of Hitler ("he was bad because he genocided the Jews, and then I guess there was also that whole WWII thing") as default truth, whereas in much of Europe it has been closer to "he was bad because he wanted German supremacy and started WWII, and then I guess there was also the whole Holocaust thing" all along. (The difference makes sense, since Europe bore the brunt of the WWII part of Hitler's record, while the Americans are under the heel of all various kinds of Zionists.) Where does the UK land between those poles?
Being anti-Hitler and pro-Hamas looks a lot more coherent in the latter frame. In fact, I think that, for example, in Germany, an interpretation like "Hitler would be pro-Israel in 2025" would catch on easily were it not for constant effort exerted by Transatlanticists and other establishment types to keep the blood debt alive and salient.
(See also the question whether Ukraine could be run by "Nazis" - reactions ranging from Americans seeing a Jewish-heritage president and concluding obviously no, to Russians seeing swastikas, German steel and people who want to violently move the Western European cultural sphere closer to Russia and concluding obviously yes)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
The thing you are talking about seems separate to me - in Germany, "anti-authoritarian parenting" is associated with the '68er/local echo of the summer-of-love hippie movement, and was satirised by stodgy bourgeois types like Loriot since the '80s if not earlier. "Free-range parenting" is at least two fashion cycles down: tiger-mom helicopter parenting rose just as public criticism of anti-authoritarian parenting peaked, and the free-range movement now is a backlash to that.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d 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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17d 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.)
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1mo ago
I've been wondering if the reason the media aren't pushing footage from places like Vo(v/l)chansk (where the rubble is still being made to bounce) more prominently nowadays is because of saturation/fatigue or because they always invite awkward comparisons to Gaza where we are on the attacker's side.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
I would counter that I went to grad school at a fairly high-ranked US institution in a hard science and I saw plenty of unprofessionalism and activism. We had
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the well-known DEI criteria on hiring and admissions
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several subfields (attached to a general cluster of "Science and Technology Studies") that were fed from the department's common funding pool and openly advocated for the full range of clichés from exploring connections between Marxist theory and [area that you would think has nothing to do it] to criticising $discipline because its usage of hard mathematical formalisms is exclusionary to women and minorities (this was an actual talk that a PhD student with them was invited to give at a $discipline retreat!)
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undergrads who agitated against in-class exams and generally any form of assessment that is somewhat resilient against cheating with SJ lingo about stress and disparate impact, and deferred to them
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profs joining organisations such as the UCS, which directly aim to leverage their academic status for partisan ends
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pronoun pressure in internal email threads, Zoom meetings etc.
...and of course, there is the general wagon circling between everyone under the umbrella of "academia". I am not in medicine, but suggesting that it is sketchy that several of the core actors on the US side who were cited as authorities on the COVID lab leak question had clear conflicts of interest was treated as somewhat traitorous by many in my social environment, and conversely it was seen as good and pro-social to participate in outreach activities such as participating in a meeting at some local town hall to assure people "as a scientist" that the expert position (that we had no special expertise on) must be believed.
The best thing I can say in its defense is that the core mechanism of inward-facing capital building, that is, publication at conferences and in journals, has not been ideologically subverted yet (in our particular area - I gather that the situation is quite different in e.g. genetics). The closest they got was attaching workshops of the form "social issues in X" with their own acceptance criteria to prestigious conferences, but participation in those generally did not translate to any respect in the field proper (though it may be useful/necessary to clear some diversity statement criteria at later career stages, which I dodged as I returned to Europe).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2mo ago
Thanks for this post - it's an interesting collection of observations/opinions, though having experienced almost all the places on your list I do not agree with some of them. Regarding your Dresden guy, it seems very natural to me how he would end up with that preference. If you live in Dresden, you spend approximately your whole life having European baroque built at any possible budget, preserved in any state of (dis)repair, and restored anywhere on the spectrum from convincing to cheap China/Las Vegas themeparkery shoved down your throat.
To begin with, liking the middle ages is not a particularly intellectuality-signalling preference in the German context - if he wanted to score those points, by his background he would in fact more likely have been dissecting the details of whatever Rococo creamcake topping stucco you were marvelling at. Are you sure you weren't inadvertently rating him according to an American scorecard? I recall noticing that at my grad school (NE US), there was a clique of locals who were frequent renaissance faire/medieval reenactment festival goers and this slotted into a wider strategy of signalling sophistication to each other, while in Germany the counterparts to those are largely considered an extremely basic and plebeian pastime.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
29d ago
No, at this point you can like Coke and McDonalds without feeling kinship to the US for it, see CN/RU(sort of). Relatedly, the leading "anti-US" countries have made anti-LGBT a pretty prominent part of their brand, and not anti-fastfood.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
My favoured conspiracy theory is that the main utility of this is somewhat similar to mafia initiation rituals: the participants know that everyone gets a nuclear level of dirt on everyone else, which establishes a level of trust that would otherwise be impossible among the powerful and eccentric crowd that is the Who's Who. Every member of the group is incentivised to cooperate with every other member of the group, at least to an extent that nobody feels sufficient spite and desperation to trigger MAD. (Imagine an Epstein Islander were to go to jail for the rest of their life for securities fraud, and felt that the others could have pulled strings to prevent this.) That most men would not exactly be repelled by sexual attention from 16 year olds is just a nice plus that makes recruitment go more smoothly (and perhaps allows participants to deceive themselves that they are just reaping the fruits of power, rather than entering a death pact). On top of that, shared experience of transgression probably builds a feeling of camaraderie.
It's worth noting that corresponding rumours from Europe (the Dutroux case) involves girls that are much younger, corresponding to Europe's lower social and legal age of consent (as American national politics operate according to California rules). This is also consistent with the illegality being the point. (Perhaps Europe's patronage networks are less effective than American ones because fewer men are actually into sexual attention from 8 year olds, creating a recruitment problem for the web of trust!)
The association with, and cultural memory of, secret satanic rituals might just be a holdover from when those were similarly grounds for automatic cancellation no matter how powerful the person engaging in them. The weakening of cultural Christianity, under that theory, necessitated switching from Satanism to underage sex. If the rise of Social Justice had not been halted, we could one day have lived in a utopia where the rich and powerful could just go to some island to hold secret blackface parties, instead of having to diddle kids.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
Maybe it's because of my particular bubble, but this is the one requirement in your list that seems completely unreasonable. My understanding is that (1) 40% of US citizens in the relevant age bracket get at least a BA, tendency rising; (2) it is very hard to get a well-paying white-collar job without one; (3) US tuition fees now run on the order of magnitude of that figure per year, more for good universities. Together, this is starting to look like six-figure student loan debt is something like the standard path into the US middle-class - asking for a person in their late 30s without it is somewhat similar to asking for someone at age 40 without a mortgage, that is, you are strongly going to bias for either unusually rich or just not a homeowner.
Also, regarding
Single and looking (of course).
Wasn't there a redpill-adjacent term like "monkey-branching"? As in, the idea that women's dating strategy involves remaining formally "attached" to the best option available all the way until a better option comes along (as opposed to breaking up and then spending some unknown amount of time looking while identifying as single). In such a setting, you could have a perfectly liquid dating market in which everyone gets matched up just fine, but your way of counting registers approximately zero "marriageable" women.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27d ago
I don't think it's particularly useful to argue about which of the two protests-turned-riots(?) has more merit - my point is just that they are sufficiently different that blanket accusations of hypocrisy towards anyone who judges them differently make no sense.
It's perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are sacrosanct but largely autonomous devolved subunits of the executive like police are fair game (they represent nobody and have a lot of leeway in how they act), and it's also perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are fair game (they are supposed to be the people's bitch) but police are inappropriate targets (they are wageslaves doing a hard job and owe allegiance to some command superior, not the people).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23d ago
"Should have" to what end?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country
Consider that countries are subject to pressures other than maximising innovation. Letting internationally-minded high-openness intellectuals out could be a win-win proposition for China and the recipient: the target country gets to capture their intellectual output, while China is rid of someone who would make trouble/destabilise the system/gets to evaporatively cool its citizenry into relative complacency.
There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.
What is the mechanism by which a Chinese student at a US university (who pays higher tuition than the average native, especially the average native at risk of being "overlooked") reduces opportunities for Americans? From what I have seen, the default seems to be that in STEM, without being subsidised by Chinese non-research MA students, the programmes from BA through PhD would be untenable at their current cost/expense level.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.
You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.
Well, with that one, I concur with the argument. Fight me?
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