67IsTheNew69
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User ID: 4109
I think most people are just reacting to the social-media clips, but https://youtube.com/watch?v=9t8qVtCm3Js&t=320s is the original video of the incident. (The video is a compilation of various street fights in Birmingham; this particular incident starts at about 5:20 and continues for about four minutes.)
67IsTheNew69
17d ago
It does seem almost criminal that nearly all American students are exposed to Shakespeare, but hardly any of them end up with the skills necessary to understand what the text of his plays actually says.
67IsTheNew69
21d ago
Gender ideology holds that these definitions, and the boundaries of what's acceptable, are obvious and self-evident. They're just what Good People believe, and if you don't believe them you're a Bad Person.
In practice this means that they're set by the people who have enough persuasiveness/social power/etc to successfully ostracize the people who don't believe in them. To the extent that gender ideology internally acknowledges these people at all, it mostly credits them in the same way you'd credit a mathematician with "discovering" or "communicating" some inherent property of numbers that was true even before the mathematician published the proof.
I think that both "you can identify as a cat" and "you can't identify as a cat" are within gender ideology's Overton window at the moment. I lean "can't" at the moment, but it's better to avoid committing to that in case new obviously self-evident truths get discovered in the future.
67IsTheNew69
21d ago
I played through Wanderstop, the "cozy game" from the writer of The Stanley Parable.
The gameplay's pretty fun, in a boring cozy-game kind of way, and the writing has a lot of good moments, but ultimately the overall story kind of failed to land with me. I'm not sure whether the
67IsTheNew69
21d ago
To be Jesus: Jesus needs to actually be the religious figure he is depicted as in the Bible. (Or, I guess it's possible that Jesus was just an ordinary guy, but reincarnation is possible more generally.)
To be Black: The definition is usually something like "My ancestors were born in Africa [during some specific time period]", but it is more difficult to nail down, and different people often mean slightly different things.
To be a cat: Some people do accept that you can be a cat in the same purely-internal-identity way that you can be a woman. Other people would draw a line based on genetics or physiology in a way that's acceptable to do for species but not gender.
67IsTheNew69
21d ago
You say that race and nationality incorporate physical traits. Are you claiming that gender does not?
Yes. Gender ideology axiomatically defines "gender" as not requiring any physical traits. Some physical traits are typical of some genders, but they're not a requirement.
(FWIW I think nationality is often primarily a historical question, along the lines of "what country were you born in" or "what country has granted you citizenship", which is also something that "gender" is defined as not being.)
67IsTheNew69
22d ago
Sexuality is definitely another one of those unobservable things that you have to take people's word on.
On the other hand, weight is straightforwardly an observable physical trait, and age is a straightforward historical claim (the date on which you were born). Race and nationality are social constructs that are hard to pin down, but generally people agree that they involve some combination of physical and historical traits.
"Racial identity" does exist, but it is not considered very useful most of the time; it's mainly used as a tiebreaker when the physical/historical facts don't fit nearly into the categories. A lot of gender ideology boils down to a values claim that "gender identity" is a much more important concept that everyone should care about.
67IsTheNew69
22d ago
So it seems there is nothing to distinguish trans people from those who self-report as being Jesus; or who self-report as having been abducted by aliens; or who self-report as having been spoken to directly by some deity; etc. Agreed?
These other claims all, to varying degrees, depend on external facts to be true. For example by asserting you've been abducted by aliens, you're asserting that aliens exist.
Gender ideology views gender claims as being more similar to someone saying "I had a dream about aliens last night." If you're talking to some weirdo who's never had a dream before, you may need to convince them that it's possible, but to most people it's obvious that the claim is both plausible and not really possible to disprove.
67IsTheNew69
22d ago
What's the evidence that "gender" exists in the way you have defined it? Is there any evidence other than self-reporting?
There have been relatively low-quality MRI studies that attempt to draw physical evidence of the concept of gender identity, but mostly it is by definition a self-reported trait, so the fact that people are self-reporting it is the evidence.
A common argument is to ask the person you're arguing with, "If you woke up this morning and found you had been transformed into a stereotypical example of the opposite gender, how would you feel about that?"
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If you would prefer that to your current body, this means that you are transgender.
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If you would feel negatively about this change, this demonstrates that you have an innate gender identity, and it's at least possible to imagine your body not being aligned with that identity. It just so happens that your body happens to be aligned with your gender identity. Lucky you!
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If you would genuinely feel ambivalent (are you sure you're not repressing anything?), then... okay, that probably exists and is a valid category of gender identity. But lots of other people do have strong feelings about that, and gender ideology is the most inclusive way to support those people.
67IsTheNew69
22d ago
(1) Yes.
(2) Yes.
(3) Yes, with the caveat:
straight men or lesbian women who refuse to date this person would be considered "transphobic."
This works similarly to anti-discrimination law. You're allowed to refuse to date any individual, but you aren't allowed to refuse to date people because they're transgender (or, more broadly, because you do not accept their gender identity). You can express preferences based on gender identity, and you can sometimes get away with expressing preferences based on physical traits, but you can't express preferences based on transgender status or things that obviously correlate with it (like "gender assigned at birth").
(You can't even express preferences in favor of them, that's called being a "chaser".)
67IsTheNew69
22d ago
Gender ideology is a big-tent movement, and many of its members can be pretty slippery about assigning concrete meanings and labels to things, so it's going to be difficult to make a specific set of claims that "those who adhere to gender ideology" believe.
With that being said, I think the main way your explanation differs from the usual story is that "sex" is not considered a category that exists. Each person has a "gender", which is an innate property that's not externally observable. Then they have several externally observable traits, things like what kinds of clothes they wear or what kind of genitals they have. Society generally has associations with which traits correspond to which genders (e.g. sundresses are typically worn by women), but it's not necessary for a person's traits to align with their gender (e.g. putting on pants does not cause you to cease to be a woman).
Taken to the extreme, it's not necessary for any of a person's externally observable traits to align with their gender. While many people feel an innate, personal sense of despair when their externally observable traits do not match their gender identity (according to their/society's general associations between traits and genders) and they should be given the resources and medical care to bring their traits into alignment with their gender identity if they wish, that's a purely personal decision on their part. It's important for everyone's gender identity to be respected regardless of the traits they have.
"Externally observable traits" here is a term I made up. The term used most often is "gender expression", which refers to the traits that other people can actually observe in practice, which is what matters most of the time. But things like "the feelings caused by the hormones in your body" are also usually considered to be something external to your gender identity, such that you might want to bring them into alignment but are not required to. (Things like the Y chromosome are not considered relevant here because they aren't easily observable. It's nice if you happen to get a bunch of traits that all align with your gender identity, but the "how" of that doesn't matter much.)
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
I am very much not a lawyer, but reading the bill, it seems like it specifically makes it illegal to "sell or deliver any three-dimensional printer in the state of New York unless such printer is equipped with blocking technology". So the company is definitely fine, and I think the individual might also be fine (doesn't "deliver" imply some other person you're delivering to?).
Unless I'm misreading, the definition of "qualified product" to which much more strict restrictions are applied only includes "digital firearms manufacturing code", not unrestricted 3D printers. It still seems like a huge problem for Internet companies, and a First Amendment issue, to apply gun-control restrictions to drawings of guns on a computer.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I suspect we've reached the top of the sigmoid for the original "train a GPT model on all the human-written text in the world" idea, and it turned out not to be possible to generate arbitrarily long/coherent/good fiction that way. The recent advancement in AI models has come from other ideas, like "multimodal" training (training on image data / audio / etc), or doing reinforcement learning on synthetic tasks.
Those other ideas can incidentally benefit fanfic -- maybe the reinforcement learning also helps the AI keep track of plots for longer, for example -- but even then I sort of suspect we're at a point where you shouldn't expect models to get much better at fanfic unless AI labs take specific action to target that use case (or they try some significantly different architecture, like text diffusion models). You definitely shouldn't expect them to be great at fanfic just because fanfic is in the training data.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
I'm sure that Opus/Mythos is trained on more objectively-verified examples (RLVR) than subjectively-critiqued ones (RLHF), and for the former examples, it's trained to produce shorter solutions with less reasoning (GRPO, rewarding shorter output).
Yeah, I think this is the the main culprit. Making models write their reasoning traces in a more terse style has been a big focus of more recent model releases -- it's usually expressed in the marketing as "uses fewer thinking tokens".
In the extreme case, you get Claude Mythos's "Neuralese" where sometimes the traces stop looking like comprehensible English. In more normal cases, though, reasoning traces look enough like normal prose that I suspect the "write more tersely" training leaks out and makes the model's creative writing worse. I've noticed newer models sometimes slip into a weird "reasoning-ese" writing style when writing things like software documentation and step-by-step explanations, for example.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
So, I'm kind of clueless about this, but are reasoning models are actually different models, as in different neural net weights?
Yes. Generally, reasoning models are trained to use special "start thinking" and "stop thinking" tokens, and to generate a specific kind of monologue in between those tokens. Similar to how RLHF biases models towards producing text that's appealing to human readers, reasoning models use techniques like RLVR to bias towards generating monologues that end in a correct solution to a problem.
Many reasoning models are trained in a way that lets you disable the reasoning by forcing them to never generate the "start thinking" token -- Claude Opus 4.8 probably uses the same weights regardless of whether you enable or disable thinking, for example -- but their weights are different from models that were never trained for reasoning in the first place.
With that being said, people used to use "chain of thought prompting" to get a similar kind of result out of regular LLMs. (I think reasoning models basically got started when AI companies saw the early success of chain-of-thought prompting and started baking it in at the training stage.)
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
The sample size of women was N = 13, so even if 9% of them also fall in the "has never been in a relationship, and fills out a survey about infidelity just to report that fact" category, it seems decently likely that none of them would have happened to do that.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
Yeah, the "thinking" process itself also counts as output tokens. When you use a reasoning model, it's basically writing a long monologue about how it's going to solve your problem and then immediately throwing it away at the end. (Different providers have different policies about whether you're allowed to see this monologue, but it often significantly exceeds the length of the actual code or whatever that the AI is writing.)
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
2032: [...] Places like Japan are receiving modern websites for the first time.
I know everyone's already piling in to tell you "this is already happening", but... Unless you expect "modern" websites to look dramatically different in 6 years, I'd say websites in Japan are already pretty modern? There are definitely a few Craigslist-style companies out there with outdated design, and there are some differences due to local design taste and language (web fonts are much less practical to use for Japanese text, for example). But overall web design standards haven't changed much ever since the flat design trend took hold a decade ago, and most Japanese organizations have caught up.
Compare www.city.osaka.lg.jp to www.chicago.gov, for example.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
I enjoy that the DNC can't even agree on what the outcome of the 2024 election was. From page 17:
Democrats netted two seats in the House, flipping ten seats from the Republicans while losing eight.
[Red box: Data appears to be inaccurate and contradicts public reporting.]
The Wikipedia article "2024 United States House of Representatives elections" is also confused about these numbers in a few places (e.g. the values in the "By state" results table don't actually add up to the stated totals), I think maybe because it's not sure how to handle the fact that George Santos had been replaced by a Democrat in a special election earlier that year, but even it doesn't actually say that Democrats flipped 10 seats. (The generally accepted narrative seems to be that they only flipped 9 seats, for a net gain of 1.)
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
I think a more straightforward way to notice that this scenario detaches P(heads|you just woke up) from the optimal betting strategy is to compare it to the following scenario:
Some researchers flip a coin without showing you the result. On Monday, they interview you about the coin and ask you to make bets about its status. Then, on Tuesday, if the result was tails, the researchers play the videotape of your interview from Monday and perform all your bets a second time on your behalf.
Here, your belief that the coin landed on tails should clearly be 0.5 even given the condition that you're currently being interviewed. But if you make any bets, you need to keep in mind that they'll be executed twice in the tails condition. The optimal strategy is the same as in the original Sleeping Beauty problem, since that problem supposes that you were going to do the same thing on both days anyway. (That strategy is not as straightforward as "assign probability 0.6667 to tails" if you can bet things like "all the money currently in my checking account" rather than just fixed dollar amounts.)
So within the problem, the concept of "credence" is not as broadly applicable as it normally is; the conditional probability is different from the optimal betting odds (and those odds themselves differ based on details of the bet). You can either stick to the conditional-probability definition, say that the odds are 0.5 (0.6667 in the original problem), and not use that value for any practical purpose. Or you can say "I think there is a 50% chance that the coin is tails, and if that is the case any actions I take will happen twice", which is a more useful fact to know when strategizing.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
I'd say my health is decent. Like many people, I should maybe exercise a little more and eat a few more fruits and vegetables. As it is I take a multivitamin and walk thousands of steps a day, and have no ongoing medical issues or concerns.
I wouldn't say I get tired easily or feel exhausted all the time. I spend a lot of time and energy on leisure activities, but I do find long social engagements (multi-hour dinner parties etc) pretty uniquely exhausting. My guess is that I'm not used to those kinds of events so need to spend a lot of mental energy analyzing what's going on and figuring out what I'm supposed to do; that and I tend to act a lot more energetic and outgoing than usual when I'm around other people.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
The blue button is the optimal choice here. Either it gets 50% of the vote and nothing happens, or it fails and I get to go to Heaven, because risking my own life to save the lives of all the people who don't understand Monty Hall problems is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice.
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
I really appreciate the insight here. Personally I think that I am genuinely good with how things are, but people sometimes express mild concern about my lifestyle, in a "you really should get that mole checked out" kind of way.
To your point about culture, I do think part of it might be that society sees Internet activity as not really being "real" social interaction, even though hanging out on a forum is probably filling the same psychological need that hanging out at a pub would've done.
Not really; the original video seems to be from a guy who was wandering around filming a bunch of street fights and arrests, and he was focused on a different arrest until roughly the start of the social-media clip.
You can hear someone yelling something like "Move away!", but it's not clear how the confrontation started.
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