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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
12hr 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
12hr 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
4d ago
· Edited 4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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.
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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