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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
That might make for a reasonable starting point for a peace prize that will be considered "fair and balanced" by Americans, but the rest of the world would care about it as much as it does about this year's Superbowl winner. Hardly anyone out here could even point out Oklahoma on a map.
The circumstance that American political theatre is a hyperstimulus would also further sabotage any attempts at global appeal: much like Europeans are more captured by anti-Red propaganda and Russians are more captured by anti-Blue propaganda than most Americans, the shit-slinging that would inevitably ensue to try and influence the choice within the inside baseball league alone would leak out, and make outsiders walk away very confident that the selection process is hopelessly biased in whatever direction.
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23hr ago
Throughout the 20th century, they also managed to stay nominally neutral and peaceful in most major conflicts (while, perhaps not entirely deservedly, staying clear of the Swiss smell of profiteering off others' misery too), and gained a certain reputation for individual activism for the greater good (Fridtjof Nansen etc.).
Is there even anyone who would be a more credible arbiter?
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2d ago
I find Hossenfelder absolutely insufferable. Sure, she sometimes talks about interesting things, but her whole personality seems to have been consumed by a massive persecution complex since long before she quit academia (and, indeed, I reckon her not entirely voluntary departure was the social immune system doing its job). Some of her earlier videos had her explaining why exactly she came to hate her workplace, and it entirely had the energy of the sort of person who would go to all the seminars, eat 60% of the snacks, complain to the organiser that she didn't like them, and then when her turn to organise came around just scream "WHERE IN MY CONTRACT DOES IT SAY I HAVE TO DO THIS" at the head of department. Probably had a story ready about how the seminar snacks are really important for her blood sugar and therefore she should be consulted about the selection too. Now that she moved on, her content flywheel seems to disproportionately rely on peddling malicious gossip and peanut-gallerying.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
so much that even leftist Europeans who today condemn Trump realize their by-then-former allies have gone too far.
But Europeans should really ask if they want the US to leave them alone entirely, because sometimes by their own standards,
I do not feel that Europeans nowadays generally have standards beyond tribalism either. They were cheering when the leading candidate got excluded from elections in Romania (likely with significant American fire support), and they will cheer if this happens to AfD or FN or whomever.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 2d ago
You haven't had a president who did the equivalent of the Charlie Kirk thing, though. Maybe AOC is capable of something like it, but "I punch you now because you might punch me afterwards", while painfully common, is not politics that leads to a good equilibrium.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Well, if you hold your president to the standard of a tiktoker...
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Why do people use Canadian/Dutch/Swiss euthanasia services when they could just off themselves? Why is the right-wing set so offended by the existence of those if offing oneself is an equivalent option? Clearly precommitting to having someone else do it is psychologically a lot easier.
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3d ago
and that there may be others who are in some way deterred, even marginally, from future criminality
This is one of the parts where death penalty advocates really lose me. I've done my share of fantasising about the sort of actions you only admit to taking in Minecraft (TM), and I'm very sure that for each of them the certainty of a swift end by firing squad would be greatly encouraging compared to the reality of a lifetime in a US supermax prison. I might be somewhat persuadable by statistics showing that death penalty candidate criminals really prefer life imprisonment, if those exist, but in this particular case the perp was a jihadi! Throwing away their life is their whole schtick.
I can understand death penalty advocates feeling moral revulsion at criminals being kept alive and healthy on their dime, but hoping for increased deterrence to me really seems like an instance of "what feels good must be good" just-world fallacy.
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4d ago
Harry is the self-insert, so his identity and traits barely matter to the interpretation. The story reads as "(You) should pine for hot blonde pureblood women", not "hot blonde pureblood women should get with filthy impure men". In a properly SJW view, suggesting that Harry should prefer female Malfoy over a hypothetical overweight black Hermione itself is problematic - there's a reason why it is generally said that (mixed) Barack Obama choosing to marry (fully black) Michelle was a tactical move.
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4d ago
What's the archetype here, the young coquette who machine-learned that a certain kind of awkwardness that comes naturally gets her male attention? That would be fair enough for the Turgenev paragraphs, but I don't really see it in the female Malfoy samples, unless you want to lump together any and all forms of non-self-aware romantic behaviour (I think even saying "affection" here would be reading too much into Turgenev as quoted).
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4d ago
I think the degree of focus on the Second Coming differs quite a bit between the various branches; it's well-known because a certain common type of modern US Evangelical is obsessed with it, but more of our Christian posters seem to be various forms of traditionalists who as far as I can tell don't put a lot of emphasis on it.
(To @SubstantialFrivolity, I imagine they might see it as something that goes beyond mere "dealing with people", like "enabling".)
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5d ago
The problem here is that some of your interlocutors might be actual Christians, who would really rather die (along with everyone else) than abide unapologetic sexual impropriety.
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5d ago
There are absolutely people in math for other reasons than money, but among the countless mathematicians I've known very few have been motivated by anything that did not factor through being the first to prove/discover/define something that others care about.
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5d ago
Is there a specific issue you have with something in the post, or is it a matter of him attacking a point you are strongly sympathetic towards in defense of a tribe you are strongly unsympathetic towards? His charges against Pinker seem fair to me, though I have admittedly not read enough of the primary source to be able to tell if they were cherry-picked from among otherwise stronger arguments (what I saw of Pinker gives off enough Gary Marcus vibes that I really can't get myself to read it in detail, and am inclined to think that just peddling it should relegate him to the trash heap of expired intellectuals despite any previous achievements, as was done with Linus Pauling, Brian Josephson etc.). Maybe the more magnanimous instances of anti-SJW Scott would have dedicated some space to a charitable theory of why Pinker's worldview can seem coherent from the inside, but I don't think Scott was consistent about doing that when facing more loathsome opponents in those days either.
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5d ago
The difference is that people largely only ever played chess for the love of the game. There are nontrivial numbers of people who do programming for the love of the game; in my experience, though, there are very few mathematicians who derive sufficient meaning from the "game"/process alone, and those who are are unlikely to find themselves in such high echelons of academia, instead gradually filtering out into other fields where you can continue pursuing it as a game (ex.: Martin Gardner, Greg Egan...).
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5d ago
I do wonder how the reaction will be when, almost inevitably, some PhD student or postdoc gets scooped on a problem they had gone all in on and commits suicide. It's not like OpenAI seems to be following the standard process of extending feelers through the field to get in touch with any existing noosphere-homesteaders before solving these.
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5d ago
Have you heard about Poe's Law? Sarcasm doesn't work when it's equally plausible that you would say the same thing in earnest, and attaching a clichéd epithet like that without any deeper reasoning behind it is the sort of thing an LLM would do in earnest.
Anyway, unapologetic? Not at all. I just think it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make, even if it annoys you.
All's well. You're willing to annoy me with AI content, and I'm willing to annoy you by derailing your threads with speculations about AI content :)
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5d ago
The parent poster literally said "AI became the best mathematician alive". I was therefore not talking about my standard "for a successful mathematician". My standard for being the best mathematician alive does involve being as good as any other mathematician alive, which does in particular mean being >=Terry.
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
when the designated Reasonable Skeptic of the rationalist diaspora
Who? Aaronson? The "took his family to Disneyland and aborted the trip after having a meltdown over seeing people not wearing masks" guy? He's many things, but nobody is designating him any combination of "reasonable" and "skeptic".
(By the way, concurring with @2rafa's suspicion below, after you have acquired your reputation as an unapologetic meat proxy, it does feel extra suspicious when you make such catchy irresistible logit-attracting utterances whose substance seems bizarre when you actually think about it.)
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6d ago
Nah. If you were human and that were your only achievement, then sure, the attention-deficient celebrity chasing normie press might lionise you as such, but those in the know would not rank you above people who have demonstrated a lifetime of consistent progress on hard problems and good intuitions (such as Terry himself, and several of his associates).
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6d ago
The question really is if it's a can of worms you want to open. Both the main US tribes have some group of well-integrated foreigners that they are cozy with and derive some benefit from, and which has a horse in some conflict the US is tangentially involved in; so far neither has turned this into a political playing ball, but you could easily see a tit-for-tat start where Mamdanicore Democrats and mainstream Republicans deport people over having the wrong stance on Israel/Palestine, which in the end would just leave everyone worse off.
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7d ago
Isn't it perverse, to begin with, if businesses that rely on cheap (or any) parking cluster where the land is valuable? If their customers drive to them, why can't you have them in whatever location in the customer's driving radius has the cheapest land instead? Most European cities, and many American ones, already work like that, with shops that cater to driving customers setting up on marginal land on the city's periphery (e.g. nestled between industrial parks) instead of downtown.
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9d ago
Beyond what @Goodguy said below, the "building the torment nexus while railing against it" thing also seems at risk of being an instance of what they seem to call the "Goomba fallacy" these days (dumb name that tells you nothing about what it is, but that's all we have). Most EAs are not in a position to contribute anything of substance to the ongoing construction of the Torment Nexus, and might even be net delaying it by sapping funds that might otherwise go towards it.
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10d ago
I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to as "the initial offense," but magicalkittycat was banned for it. What is "jannie cover?"
It looks like he was banned for attacking @stoatherd, but the offense I am talking about is in the opening post of this thread (invoking a principle (apologise for false accusations that you make) that you provably do not consider to apply to yourself). "Jannie cover" is moderators banning people for calling this out.
I think you could analyse all that transpired in this thread as an extension of an initial offense (magicalkittycat's (mistargeted?) attack on stoatherd), but in that case, looking at the sequencing of posts, this reveals a more general structural problem with moderation. As far as I can tell, the chronology was:
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magicalkittycat attacks stoatherd, seemingly based on a mixup of usernames, and they have the exchange in the thread you linked where the mixup comes out but magicalkittycat does not apologise
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magicalkittycat makes a new top-level post attacking some outgroup senator for not apologising after making a false accusation
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stoatherd calls him out on this
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you ban stoatherd for his callout
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I see that snapshot of the situation and start writing my response
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you go back to the above thread and ban magicalkittycat for the original attack
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I post my response to your ban of stoatherd
Between the beginning and the end of the chain, almost a whole day had passed. Not only is this a whole day in which the situation was allowed to fester in ambiguity (with plenty of opportunity for readers to build the expectation that this is yet another of the numerous cases where the moderators will not punish someone who manifestly deserved punishment), but the order in which you then proceeded to respond to the situation (punish the downstream reactions first, and only then move up the chain) created a window in which the above expectation would be confirmed (initial act unpunished, reactions cracked down on).
Moreover, due to how slow the response was, by the time the punishment for magicalkittycat's original post was dispensed, the community's attention window has long moved on, and hardly anyone will even see that ban. Therefore, it neither conveys deterrence to others who might commit a similar offense, nor a sense that justice was served to those who were offended by it (unless they were so obsessed as to save magicalkittycat's original post and make a note to come back to it the next day). The bottom line is broken window upon broken window was lined up and left a large number of readers with the diffuse sense that moderation is unfair.
Concrete suggestions to improve this situation (any subset of them would be an improvement):
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when untangling heated situations where you are going to punish multiple people who attacked each other, moderate in chronological order
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if a post was reported but the mod response is delayed because of internal discussion or nobody having time, have some way to flag "we received reports and are currently deciding how to proceed" to distinguish this state from "we consider this post good and won't do anything about it"
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if moderation was slow to respond, consider the delay a mitigating circumstance for "vigilante justice" posts that offended back against the initial offender
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link to related moderator action, so it doesn't wrongly appear one-sided if one side's punishment is prominent while the other's is buried (i.e. your modhat post against stoatherd should have linked to the modhat post against magicalkittycat)
I wonder if it will ever be possible again to get a proper, ideological-Turing-test-passing account of the Blue worldview on this website, because your quote from @MaiqTheTrue for sure is not. You depict a right-winger being dramatic over an essentially true development, and imagine lined up against him an array of left-wing delusions. How easy it would be, if only we could get our opponents to see reality! (Maybe they just need to go outside and touch some grass.)
The actual fundamental disconnect between Right and Left that your juxtaposition fails to capture is that both are driven by real urgencies based on their respective circles of concern, in a way that relief is mutually exclusive. Just zooming in on immigration concerns, the right-wing doomer view is essentially something like "are there no brakes on the replacement train at all? You already got like 20% Muslims or something in and we understand that in practical terms those 20% will never leave or decrease, why can't you even have so much grace as to pause and let us see the consequences?". In this lament, the left-wing doomer hears something like: "of all the people that are actively living and dying in misery at our hands as we speak, you have managed to save some. This horrifies us. Can't you at least take a break for a few years where you let them all die?". The Right watches in horror the irreversible ratchet of their nation being diluted; the Left watches the irreversible ratchet of lives being wasted.
Perhaps a comparison with abortion would be apt. Third-world immigrants are to right-wingers roughly as fetuses are to left-wingers. One sees a group they care about (natives/women) enslaved and oppressed for the benefit of some prop that has negligible moral value (uncivilised foreigners/lumps of cells). The other one sees uniquely vulnerable human beings who they have a special duty to protect (babies/victims of their ancestors' cupidity) being callously left to die for the comfort of the spoiled and morally reprehensible (slutty women/narrow-minded nativists). The right-wing perspective, to the Left, then winds up sounding about as monstrous as "you have already forced so many women to give birth unwillingly. Can't we at least take a break for a few years where we abort all/most of the pregnancies?"
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