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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
4hr ago
I think you are kind of dodging my point here. To say it a bit differently: what do you think gives you more of an authority to speculate about the motivations of the modal woman than the person you were responding to? If you are just going to say that it's your own presumable female biology, the "take it to Bluesky" charge seems fair enough. "I'm a woman, and I don't feel anything resembling that instinct" would have been a fair response; the implicit "I'm a woman, so I can authoritatively assert that women don't feel that instinct" is just progressive tokenism.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll make sure to check out the museums (and the food was ranking high on the todo list anyway, open to concrete (anti-)recommendations there too). Do you know if there's anything interesting to do with the more recent history of the city, specifically including the Japanese occupation?
As I said in my parallel response to problem_redditor, the two-week period is not entirely under my control, but I can probably fit in a short detour to Malaysia somewhere.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Thanks for the recommendations! These all look interesting, and quite in line with what I'm looking for. I would add a more specific question for whether there are parts of town that are particularly interesting on the street level, in the sense of having local colour rather than being all globalised slop. (I'm quite open to shantytowns and the like too.) Also, anything touching on the military history of the place? The British colonial era, prisons/bunkers/batteries that changed hands during WWII or were otherwise connected to it being overrun, etc.?
The reason for the ~two weeks is that it's a technically-for-work trip (but with a low expectation for the actual density of work that will be done). A one- or two-day excursion to Malaysia is probably conceivable; how is the transport situation to go to Malacca or beyond? Are there good trains, or is it sensible to rent a car and drive?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Someone sufficiently snarky may be tempted to describe your combination of rejecting progressivism and still expecting progressive-style deference towards your lived experience as a "leopards eating my face" moment.
More seriously, what is your working principle here? Your interlocutor, it seems, is not allowed to engage in evopsych speculation about women on account of not being a woman. Does this restriction only apply to the human male/female categorisation, or are there more? (Can Americans speculate about what motivates Europeans? Zoologists about animals? Christians about Atheists?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
It occurs to me that the "power differential" argument could actually be analysed as almost entirely upside down. Isn't it the case that the 20 year old woman is the one with good BATNA/options, and hence greater negotiating power, compared to the 50 year old one who would be left with whatever the market looks like for 50 year old divorcees? In fact, as long as there are in fact 20 year old women who date 50 year old men, the 50 year old woman's equal-age-bracket husband is even less incentivised to stay in his marriage rather than chase that possibility; so perhaps the age-gap relationship is indeed bad for someone's power differential, but not the one of the people involved in it.
I'm not convinced that this is outweighed by whatever impact the difference in "life experience" has. Outside of romance novels, most 50 year old men do not actually seem like they have acquired a mastery of guile and manipulation that no 25 year old could hope to compete with, but are basically what you'd expect a boomer to be - that is, financially a bit more settled, perhaps a bit less anxious, mentally quite a bit less sharp and more rigid, and slowly falling out of touch with modernity. I don't see this conveying a degree of power over young women that must be regulated, unless you hold that they are constitutionally incapable of resisting someone who can stay calm (in a slightly loopy way) and buy them dinner.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
I'm not convinced it's America. A lot of countries seem to have working mass English education, with some notable exceptions being Japan, to a lesser extent China, and historically (though not anymore) France. At the same time, a lot of European countries force kids to learn a third language at school too, and at least in Germany I have not observed that going any better than second-language instruction in anglophone countries.
The best-fit model for this is something like "school does nothing, and kids will learn a language if and only if they need the pop culture of that language". The rare examples of masses failing to learn English are just the rare countries that produce enough good stuff of their own.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Out of your list, This Is Going To Hurt and the Golden Oecumene/Culture comparison sound like I would enjoy them the most, just going off of your blurbs. The former just carries the risk of being seen as a bit too much of a vanilla/safe/on-the-nose choice for Scott's blog.
Having read Blindsight, I also don't see what a review of it would add. The book, while being interesting in the way an academic paper is, is also dry and bloodless like one, and something something trying to squeeze juice from a brick.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
I expect to be going on a trip (on the order of two weeks) to Singapore fairly soon. Since it will be my first time there, any recommendations for things to see or avoid?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
I always had the impression that there is a real category of men that can be described as "attracted to women and femininity, but finds actual women too alien", and therefore prefers male sex/life partners who they can actually empathise with/relate to/theory-of-mind. Relatedly, futanari (so much material reading as "it would be hot if a woman did/experienced this, but it requires having a dick"). On the other side of the aisle, lesbians who are into butch/masculine or (in East Asia especially) "prince-like" handsome women also seem to be a thing, which I'd readily analyse in the same way. (Mirroring futa, perhaps, mpreg?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
At its core, I would say, it's just political low openness, that is, the belief that for the polity, things that are new or different from what it is accustomed to are a priori bad. Low/high openness in individual humans is understood well enough, and likewise does not care for the particular provenance or authenticity of a habit: an adult could discover chicken tenders at age 30, gradually slide into eating them exclusively and decide at 40 that trying new foods over the tried and reliable tendies is just not enjoyable or worth it. It doesn't have to be this extreme: a tendiemaxxer friend of mine can be convinced to try most things, but you have to spend half a day making the case why it's a good idea, eat some of it in front of him and show that you are not experiencing any side effects you hid from him, and then he'll start with tiny bites and wait for a bit to meditate on how he feels about it (and then in the end complain that you should have just let him stick with his usual diet).
Contra this, liberalism in essence is "did you see that Chinese bull penis hangover soup on youtube shorts too? We should try that some day, aren't you curious", applied to society. A baseline attitude of "this is different, how exciting" vs. "this is different, I feel uncomfortable".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
Well, same(ish) - I have not been featured in the news (nor is it likely to happen anytime soon given that I am in unfashionable theoretical CS), but then on the other hand I count some actual historians among my relatives so I have some inside view of that sausage factory. I think the main difference to me is that the thing you describe as a nadir does not feel particularly bad to me, on its own. The educator part of the job has always felt fundamentally adversarial to me - even well-selected students will at any point in time use 95% of their galaxy brains (or, well, of whatever fraction of those they are willing to invest in your course at all) only to engage in mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are perfect just as they are, and to convince you that they learned and applied what you wanted them to without them actually having done those things. (The sheer inventiveness I've seen in schemes to circumvent automated plagiarism detectors in programming assignments that could be done with a fraction of the effort, or to hide transparently false lemmas in the bowels of a Rube Goldberg proof of a three-liner that was covered in class!)
To teach these students - not an anonymous public, and not on a topic of any political valence, but people you know and a subset of whom you hope to elevate to colleagues some day! - requires constant subterfuge and deception to get past the ego defenses of their monkey brains. That you would do all that and more when actually just talking to normies seems absolutely par for the course for me. It's not like I'm not bothered by the politically motivated deception cases @RenOS was hinting at, but there I see the problem somewhere else. It is only really bad if, before deciding to deceive the public, these scientists have already deceived themselves, or otherwise transgressed against the mental discipline that a scientist needs for science as a whole to function in the long run. (Many cases of this don't even involve politics, cf. every case of trash stats replication crisis just-so story zingers. I blame the general culture in US academia where idealism about science qua science is seen as cringe and unbefitting of a successful working adult.) If it were as he says, and these people indeed merely advanced their agenda when talking to the general public but treated evidence fairly while engaging in the scientific process, I would perhaps find them tasteless as politicians, but not compromised as scientists.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
As someone with a hobby for trying to theory-of-mind others' fetishes, I would imagine that there is some element of taking observation/judgement to detract from the enjoyability of the act, or feel oppressive in a way that doesn't let you fully indulge sexually - some sort of anti-exhibitionism (except not necessarily concerned with the gaze of third parties as much as with that of your target?), and closely related to the time stop trope (the thing where the protagonist can freeze his time for everyone but himself and have his way with the bodies of other people in everyday situations, the targets being none the wiser).
If you were to feel crushingly self-conscious about how the person you are performing any sexual act with perceives you, it would make sense that any act where that possibility is not removed would be strictly inferior.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
Both for you and @Corvos, the thing is that scientists (this is in fact more true in the "hard sciences" than in History) don't generally think of theories in terms of "true" or "false" (or even "likely to be (...)"), but rather just as better/worse/incomparable, or often even just "more powerful" or "less powerful", models for generating predictions. A newer theory may be "more powerful" in that it generates more accurate predictions more often (but really, it will usually be the case that the newer theory does better than the older one in a few more contexts and worse than the older one in slightly fewer - "incomparable"), but also more finicky, in that it's harder to understand and apply correctly, and therefore inferior for a particular situation. Physicists will boldly use Newtonian physics to calculate the behaviour of slow heavy objects on Earth, and not mention anything about newer theories to any 6th graders they are tasked with teaching, without feeling like they are lying to anyone.
The psychology here is really more akin to if you ask an engineer for the best plane, no further instructions provided, and get a modern Airbus rather than an SR-71 Blackbird. The engineer might even in his professional context feel strongly that the SR-71 and YF-12 constituted the pinnacle of aviation engineering, and argue passionately about the particular design tradeoffs between the two, but he will not for a moment feel like he deceived you or betrayed his professional oaths by furnishing you with neither; they are simply not planes that it is reasonable for you to deploy or fly, and it is exceedingly unlikely that they will be actually better suited for your use case, whatever it is, than the boring reliable airliner that can even occasionally survive Indonesian airport infrastructure. Now, if you are a plane buff, have a cold war spy mission to run or happen to be an activist who spends every waking hour malding about the mothballing of the Concorde, you would probably feel a terrible sense of betrayal about this, but as someone who is not, would you think the engineer deserves condemnation?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
I think this is standard science explainer practice, for reasons that can be completely orthogonal to the political, that has the propensity to sound bad to laypeople who have an incorrect model of how the scientist's notion of "truth" works. I will, with apologies, admit that I have the sketch of a post to the effect of "newsflash: physicists and even mathematicians 'lie' to you in the exact same way all of the time" in mind but do not have the energy or time to produce it.
Instead, for a different argument that is more related to the political dimension of this specific issue, I think that his way of explaining it just stems from a broader sense of distrust that the engaged lay public insists in every public-facing academic entirely through its own fault. If you do quantum computing, it is almost impossible to even mention superposition unless you want to wind up being quoted in a procession of powerpoints about the possibilities of doing multiple computations simultaneously forever; and if you do neurobiology, even as much as acknowledging that something quantum might have something to do with chemistry including chemistry that happens in the brain will forever be used as ammunition by "due to their quantum souls capable of seeing every outcome simultaneously, humans will never be replaced by machines" type people even if you started your popsci career hoping to get the public acquainted with the mechanistic understanding of the brain. This doesn't have to happen to you or someone you know many times for you to start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is feeding them information selectively so that they arrive at the least wrong conclusion rather than feeding them information freely so that they motivatedly reason themselves into something much worse (here, probably, any acknowledgement of controversy would just put "Sparta bros" into "300 is a valid scientific theory" mode). Of course this sucks for those of your readers who can actually hold differentiated views and deal with uncertainty, but they can always read the literature. Besides, the ones who protest the loudest tend to turn out to be exactly those motivated reasoners upon cursory inspection all too often. (Similar to the fun "spot the Scientologist" game whenever public-facing criticism of psychiatry is involved.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
This sounds like a very clever argument that casually sweeps away material reality in favour of the world of memes, quite like, gosh indeed, what a stereotypical leftist college kid may deploy.
Non-violence, as you frame it, wielded by the socially powerful may indeed feel like an "I win" card, impossible to oppose with truth or any but the most tailored notion of beauty, and hence like a fundamentally unfair "defect" option in the domain of discourse. This is all very terrible, if you think or can pretend that the domain of discourse is all there is; but those who still have to interact with the physical world may recognise that even though being verbally/morally/metaphorically beaten, pissed on, shot and having the cost of the bullet billed to your relatives may feel every bit as humiliating as having those things done to you literally, only the latter actually leaves you dead and your mother robbed of her last $5. If the price of not accepting moral defeat by an overwhelming moral power is pulling physical defeat back into the Overton window, not everyone may conclude that moral defeat is so bad an option.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
I know very similar things have been said in parallel responses a number of times already, but really, you have answered your own question in the last paragraph. The world is a terrible place! This story is outrageous, but so is the life story of every single one of a million of starving orphans in the Third World, any random child of a single mother having a severe case of Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, or lone elderly person caught up in one of those Floridan elderly care scams where the local judge and state-appointed legal guardians are in cahoots, or anyone working in a Bangladeshi sweatshop. It turns out we don't actually care for all these horrible fates if they don't directly intersect with ours, and we surely wouldn't even have the capacity to if we actually tried.
Whether accurate or not, the pitch of the toxoplasma stories is that their contents, and our allocating a share of mind-space to having a stance on them, will have a real material impact on our lives. What is the pitch for caring about the Pelicot case, over caring about any of the other myriad of outrageous tragedies including the ones I listed above?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
Well, and yet none of the other countries with more broad-based usage of public transport physically segregate minority riders. If you want to argue that the US is unique because segregated seating became a civil rights issue and this resulted in an overcorrection preventing more justified action against minorities on public transport, then it seems as fair to say that "Rosa Parks made public transport a last resort option" as it is to go one step up the causal chain and say "segregation made public transport a last resort option".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
Well, that's the speculative part of the proposal. Nobody doubts government childcare facilities are garbage right now, but I would like to see how far we could go with a moonshot to make it not so. It's not hard to justify considering we are essentially looking at an epidemic of people unwilling to put up with the work of childrearing in the form that is expected.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
Well, the set of people who don't mind using it would be drawn from both people who otherwise would raise their own children and those who would otherwise go childless. The latter will compete with you on those terms regardless (modulo the one-time competitive advantage from the cash injection), and you shouldn't forget the downside of letting birthrate decline continue as usual, which is that the entire pyramid scheme of big society may collapse. Surely you can't be completely indifferent towards the prospect of being left to your own devices in old age with no medical insurance or pension (any savings might at that point be confiscated or devalued by inflation, and for good measure they might also legally restrict the right of any children you raised personally to preferentially support you rather than slaving away for the entire cohort of geriatric millennials). Reducing the probability of this scenario at least a little winds up on the other side of the scale.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
Surely singles are not the category we are talking about? Like many I know, I'm in the category of "long-term partner, no children". Either way, why do you think it doesn't pass the smell test? I think electronic entertainment is the most obvious reason why the idea that people in the 60s/80s had at least as much fun is the one that doesn't pass the smell test: when given the choice, people overwhelmingly choose games, modern videos and slop over just about any [activity that was available in the '80s].
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
It occurs to me that to Americans this might still not read as upper-middle class. They would be looking for something like villas with large gardens and 3m tall hedgerows blocking outside views in a car-only neighbourhood, and certainly no parks, stations, big roads or hospitals anywhere in ear- or eyeshot. Perhaps more similar to a nouveau riche dacha settlement, in Russian terms.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
I think it's borderline, but insofar as the idea is to signal to the Russian upper brass that they are not even safe in their apartment blocks, it meets dictionary definitions such as Merriam-Webster's "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
Sir, this is a Wendy's culture war forum. You are not talking to people who are rejecting you from quant jobs, though if I were the hiring manager for one, I would reject you just on the basis of these posts. Not being so thin-skinned that you would fly off the handle over a tortured misinterpretation of a word is also a job requirement.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
Cool, the answer to that is the usual one: if your competitors are leaving money on the ground by acting suboptimally, prove them wrong by outperforming them. Polymarket and several cryptocurrency trading platforms have open APIs, you can go and write code to fleece the foreign swots with your superior ability right away if HFT is your thing.
(Honestly, though, to me it just sounds like you farmed good scores on easy tests and are very good at finding excuses for avoiding the hard ones that satisfy yourself.)
If you want to do nitpicky exegesis, this only singles out "ourselves and our Posterity" as the intended beneficiary of the "Blessings of Liberty", since the "to" can't attach to any of the preceding clauses (provide for the common defence "to" ourselves(...)...?). Moreover, it's just listed as one among many objectives. The "We the People" bit, as much as people like turning it into a shibboleth for their favoured political package, does not seem to be doing anything apart from identifying the party in whose name the following document is issued.
It seems like a rather unreasonable leap to go from something that amounts to "In order to strive towards objectives A, B, C, D, E and F, we proclaim the following set of rules to constrain the behaviour of $entity" to "The first duty of $entity is some mixture of C and D but only for the beneficiaries stated in F". It would even be unreasonable if you just said that {A,B,C,D,E,F} together is "the first duty" of the US government: the whole point of having a constitution is to not leave it up to the government, or any future individuals, to determine how to best implement these six things, but to establish a priori a common agreement on how it is to be done, so that these instructions (hopefully less ambiguous than the original goals) can henceforth be used as a terminal goal. You would not need a constitution otherwise, but could just have a one-paragraph blob saying "the government shall form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, (...)".
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